To further a discussion on [EMAIL PROTECTED] earlier today, There seems to be an increasing number of distributions suffering from atrophy. This can be caused from the authors losing interest, having insufficient time to maintain their work, and many other reasons. This situation oftentimes affects a significant number of important and widely-used distributions, preventing them from operating in a manner consistent with their intent.
I suggested that it might be a sane idea to consider starting a project who's mission would be to take over the maintenance of distributions that, for lack of criteria with greater specificity: a) are popular, well-used distributions b) are no longer being actively maintained by their authors c) have unresolved rt tickets of a significant amount of time Preferrably, maintenance take-overs would occur with the blessing of said author. The scope of such maintenance take-overs would ideally be limited to fixing outstanding issues, ensuring nominal operation across platforms and perl versions, and addressing bugs reports made against the distribution via rt, etc. In the interest of staying focused, the CPAN QA Project would not be chartered to address new features, enhancements or wishlists. Chip mentioned that the Debian project has such a team, named the QA team. They have a concept of orphaned packages and inactive maintainers. Their QA team has a process[1] and critera for their team taking over the maintenace of qualifying packages[2]. There is a similar project, Phalanx[3], that address a correlative problem space, but has a different charter and set of goals. The CPAN QA project would not seek to duplicate the efforts of Phalanx, and would aim to be supplemental. Please note that I am not necessarily volunteering myself for this effort. I simply see a need for such a project and feel a discussion would be in the best interest. If someone feels particularly strong about initiating such a project, it would likely very much benefit the community. [1] http://debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-beyond-pkging.en.html#s-mia-qa [2] http://qa.debian.org/orphaned.html [3] http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/ -- Adam J. Foxson
