Re: Evolving away from source package realms
Didier Raboud wrote:
> What most respondents have gotten across as the bulk of my proposal seems to
be: "we could limit upload rights to certain packages"
>
> ... where what I was trying to get across was: "we could team-maintain the
core of Debian (and by extension, other subsets)"
Frankly, reading your original message, most of it seemed indeed to
revolve around the former, with "remove the source-package-level
realms" dropped in as a somewhat casual note near the end. I suspected
that that was your real focus (and already replied to that), but it
wasn't that clear.
> The problem I'm trying to describe (and therefore the mitigations/solutions I
put up for discussion) is that source package realms are not the right
granularity for Debian development anymore.
As I understand it, you may not be looking for the right "package
granularity" so much as you're looking for the right "developer
granularity".
If the problem is that the maintainer of some package isn't
collaborating -- specifically, refuses to apply a particular patch --
it doesn't really matter whether maintainership rights are assigned at
single package level or at another level. What matters is that you
don't want to have a single maintainer who can exercise veto power.
Larger "package realms" would probably be maintained by more people,
so that would indeed generate the intended effect, but as a more or
less accidental byproduct of a larger change that might have other
undesired consequences (specifically, several posters have expressed
the concern that this might be detrimental to developer motivation).
I'd prefer a proposal that addresses directly the specific issue.
In fact, I even wonder whether your proposal would actually solve
anything. In Debian, people only do the work that they want to do. If
you want to add more maintainers to a package and can't find
volunteers, you might work around that by "promoting" maintainers of
related packages to co-maintainers of the whole realm. But what will
happen in most cases is that the promotion will remain written on the
(electronic) paper -- most people will just keep working on their
packages like they've always been doing, will never exercise their
co-maintainer powers, and will probably decline to be involved in any
dispute that might arise over a package that happens to be "in their
realm" but that they have no direct interest in.
That said, there is some merit to the proposal of a "core team" that
collectively maintains a set of "core packages". There are already
delegated teams that maintains key parts of Debian -- release team,
FTP team, installer team, etc. -- so I suppose that a "core team"
would be a nice addition (pending a good round of yak-shaving over the
name).
But let's not forget that all existing teams have formed by
*voluntary* aggregation and their members generally choose whom to
work with. Trying to force the creation of a new team might not work
well. For example, several years ago the DPL of the time forced the
addition of a new FTP member. That resulted in the resignation of
other members.
Gerardo
Reply to: