This is an update on my project to sort out distributions which have two or more people with first-come indexing permissions.
When I started this project, there were 547 distributions with mixed ownership. So far I’ve resolved 76% of them, leaving 130 on my hit list. With projects like this, I start by working through all the easy cases, gradually picking off slightly harder ones. This helps me learn a bit more about the problem, refine the wording of emails, and hash out a process & tools. The most common case has been where the original releaser has given co-maint to one or more people who then added some modules. Where the original releaser is still active and has first-come on the lead module, I’ve given them first-come on all modules. Another common case is where the original releaser has handed over the distribution, and all subsequent releases have been by one person. There were some cases where I knew the original releaser has passed away, so I just transferred perms, but otherwise I email the involved parties, to see whether the current maintainer should get first-come (and generally they have). There have been a number of dists where two or more people have worked together. In all cases so far an email and prompted an easy resolution. Some of these have involved quite a few dists. Another pattern I’ve seen a few times is where a module has been split off from a large distribution into a new distribution of its own, and then gained some additional modules. The new lead module often has a signature of indexing perms inherited from the originating distribution, but the new module(s) reflect the small set of people maintaining the spun-out distribution. A related pattern is where a distribution has been absorbed into another distribution, so you end up with two different permissions signatures. Of the remaining 130 cases, about 30 or 40 look relatively straightforward. Some of the rest have fallout from historical cases where "foobar" and "Foobar" were allowed to be different modules. And there are some which prompted a "WTF?!" when I had a quick look at them. There are some where I suspect the person was no longer interested, so dropped their permissions on some of the modules in a distribution, but not all of them. And then there are P5P ones, which I’ll talk to Sawyer and P5P about. Neil
