-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 With all of the unclaimed herds and unclaimed packages within them, I started to wonder what will happen after the GLEP 67 transition finally comes to fruition. This left me with some concerns and I was wondering what the community thinks about them, and some possible solutions.
There is a large number of packages from unclaimed herds that, at this time, look like they will not be claimed by developers. This will likely result in a huge increase in maintainer-needed packages (and subsequent package rot). This isn't to say that some of these packages weren't previously in a "maintainer-needed" like state, but now, they will explicitly be there. A possible approach to reducing this is to adopt some new policies. The first of which is an "adopt-a-package" type program. In functionality, this is no different than proxy-maintenance, however, this codifies it into an explicit policy whereby users are encouraged to step and take over a package. This obviously requires a greater developer presence in the proxy-maint project (or something similar), but, personally, I think that a stronger dev presence in proxy-maint would be better for Gentoo as a whole. The second policy change would be that maintainer-needed packages can have updates by anyone while maintaining the standard "you fix it if you break it" policy. This would extend to users as well. With the increased ease that users can contribute via git/github, they should be encouraged to contribute and have their efforts facilitated to ease contributions to whatever packages they desire (within the maintainer-needed category). Similar to the concept of a "bugday," coupled with above, an "ebuildday" where users and devs get together so users can learn to write ebuilds and for devs to work together to maintain packages that usually fall outside their normal workload could prove beneficial to the overall health of Gentoo packaging. Once again, these are just some random musings inspired by recent events on the dev ML, and thought it might be worth discussing. I've cc'd proxy-maint as a lot of this discussion is likely to involve them, and would like them to put in their official opinion as well. - -- NP-Hardass -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJWnc1RAAoJEBzZQR2yrxj7WMYQALdOH13N+N0hCuDrCKcFwhp1 GjosbY2ZQsqVL8WX46K8I+Kr9EV/JD1LWfB5S24YMANFgk+iAHJUlDebKmbIOUek JiT1eRG8LrIJE3VWfMtJxMfPxzkYEPf+Ew3DXBADekhtWbIb3Ha9hWYGgD/gZ2UN vY0xDBU2oXuJjoSTYwfdbVXG950CgiEfI+QtaeHaMihdqR/ZB7WcHXx788EnnXeA Q9M3JtNbRyLL7UI7XeVzxN7A+ODhN3highYXELdImHR5fZh2T7sm1Limvev5lgaU uiugUMnFbDISqiWLSPFbTaJBwrl0tyqa9hjYnhP9LLj8zIXLe/PN+8hQ7Et8aq8w hRUr6ntm++4HFD2TKySZ4So09yntb+xapeFIM4UjTvN6Tfy2gUyTnpzDdsAlBoHt zhExBzidA+g1syCY5LrMkndP+8iKDDbUlPkMtfldf2XBMXu5jFBfUXKoZRFC9P27 XOqneJHcBEjocjvcmnu4BeUz0+Nu3jRpQuGj35hNLTsFyG7Dh9Qw1eJ0mDnCm2PZ YrWWw2Z7nJGKsStwI3Ox6HIeXHuiFGup4XfveC0jE/ggZcK+E9jrkXDbwc9sOPYg WRMsgCHFHke1YgPhOxHA1RSE0bZv5j9CYkJx8piif8c0p1HkPUj93r3zgpycfSRi 35R7+OKBC4AQeIIoCBXI =5UdF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
