Hi all, >From what I've read on the list recently, there's a lot of demand for non-maintainer updates to ebuilds. Esp. with the upcoming Git migration, I predict there will be a much larger influx of changes from users.
Some developers (eg myself) have a general policy [2] that we send out to the list occasionally welcome everybody to touch our packages (so long as they own their breakages). A few packages discouraged touching due to fragility, but mostly we were a very open society. Back in the days of "The Old Ones", this was a general practice for all developers, but somewhere along the line, some developers seem to have grown territorial of their ebuilds. Debian has their own NMU process: http://wiki.debian.org/NonMaintainerUpload http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#nmu With a long whitelist of devs/teams that welcome it: http://wiki.debian.org/LowThresholdNmu So I'd like to hear input on how developers & users (esp proxy-maintainers) on maybe writing a NMU GLEP. I'm open to all input, but here's some initial questions I'd like to hear your answers to: - How should developers, herds & teams communicate how welcome they are to NMU changes on their packages? - to humans? - to automated scripts? - where? metadata.xml? - What sorts of changes (see Debian NMU): - Are welcome? - Are prohibited? - Are somewhere between the two? - Does this need to be controlled per-package? - What about upstream-rejected changes? - How do we encourage responsible ownership of changes that cause breakage? [1] 1. I've been leading infra for a few years now, and I've got a few ground rules, maybe we can run with parts of those: - If you break something, own up ASAP; there will be no punishment, just help in getting it fixed. - You're responsible for many people's systems/access/privacy, don't abuse it. (Ciaranm: since you were talking about lack of honesty of corporate cultures in response to my previous mail, here's your chance again). 2. This isn't entirely selfless, I want to have to tell people less that they can go and touch most of my packages WITHOUT asking me or waiting for me to reply to a bug. -- Robin Hugh Johnson Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead E-Mail : robb...@gentoo.org GnuPG FP : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85
