More and more, I am finding developers who are afraid to touch packages for even minor things if they're not the maintainer. This is a sad state of affairs and not the reason we have maintainers. We have maintainers to assure that a package is being taken care of, not to establish some kind of "territory" over that package. Because of this misconception, I would like to come up with and document a listing of things that any ebuild developer can feel free to do to any package *without* maintainer consent. These are generally all minor things, but things that I think are important. I'm going to list off the things that I can think of, and encourage everyone else to speak up if I've missed something.
- HOMEPAGE changes - LICENSE changes - arch-specific patches/dependencies - If someone is requesting KEYWORD changes on a package and it requires a patch or additional dependencies for your architecture, you are not only permitted, but really are required to make the necessary changes to add support for your architecture. - Typo fixes - SRC_URI changes - If the source has moved, feel free to fix it. We shouldn't have to wait on the maintainer to fix something this simple. - *DEPEND changes due to changes in your packages - If a package that you maintain moves, splits, or otherwise changes in a manner that requires dependency changes on any other packages in the tree, you should make those changes yourself. You're free to ask for assistance, of course, but you have the power to make the changes yourself without asking permission. After all, you're the one "breaking" the package, so you should be the one to "fix" it. - Manifest/digest fixes - metadata.xml changes There's a couple more that I wouldn't mind seeing as things developers can do without the maintainer, but I can see how these might be a bit more controversial, so I'm asking for input. - Version bumps where the only requirement is to "cp" the ebuild - (for arch teams) Stabilization of new revisions of an already stable package - An example of this would be being able to stabilize foo-1.0-r2 if foo-1.0 (or foo-1.0-r1) is already stable, but not if only foo-0.9 is stable. So, what do you guys think? -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee Gentoo Foundation
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