Hi, On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 01:42:11AM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote: > On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 01:19:27PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > >Dear Stefano, Steve and Luk, > > Hi again Charles! > > >I like a lot Stefano's statement about collaborative maintainance: > >"Collaborative maintenance should not be mandatory (we do have several very > >efficient one-man-band developers), but should be our default". > > > >First of all, I would be interested to know if it is a point of divergence > >between the candidates. Then, if there is interest for such a discussion, I > >would like to encourage you to develop your ideas on this subject, especially > >on what you can do as a DPL or DPL assistant. > > I'm very much a fan of people working together on their packages, but > I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to make teams the default. If
I think for the vast majority of packages in our archive this would simply be overkill. But I'm interested what you think about the following: In Debian we have some packages that are either by default on every system or are commonly expected to be found on Debian systems. Such tools could be called the core of our system, because they are most commonly used on a Debian system. Such packages include coreutils, gzip, grep, hostname, initscripts, obviously all the tools that make up a Debian system like dpkg, at, cron and some more. Short said: More or less all packages with a priority of Standard or higher, although one would need to think about this scope wrt to the following proposal. Some of these packages are very well maintained and others.. well, bug numbers sometimes speak for themselves. For these packages we have that cool text on the PTS pages: "The package is of priority standard or higher, you should really find some co-maintainers." which brought me on this at all. What I thought about when I read that is: "HaHaHa, we are kidding on us own, because we recommend something to us, what should actually be the default (for this type of packages). Thats why I thought it would eventually be a good idea to form a core team, meaning a team of a bunch of people (10-20?), with wide-spread knowledge and known to have enough free time (e.g. people who have > 50 packages and aren't able to keep up with the bug reports in their own packages wouldn't qualify) that gets the job to (co-)maintain all these packages that are very important to us. It doesn't mean that the existing maintainers are taken away the packages, because they could still stay the maintainers, but obviously some of these packages are not easily maintainable by one person. What do you think about such a proposal? Best Regards, Patrick
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