[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: package ownership in Debian



Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Clint Adams wrote:
>   
>>> Yes, and we could start by really enforcing co-maintainership.  Make it 100%
>>> mandatory for all essential, required and base packages at first.
>>>       
>> Are there packages which are particularly well co-maintained right now?
>>     
>
> Particularly well co-maintained?  I don't know.  Well co-maintained?  Yes.
> cyrus-imapd comes to mind, but that's because I follow that one very
> closely.
>
>   
Gee, thanks boss.

As a member of this team, I want to add a few benefits of
team-maintenance that I've observed:
(Unordered)

- To many eyes, all bugs are trivial. Maybe not all bugs, but I know
that the ability to have someone looking over your shoulder makes
catching mistakes a lot easier, especially typos.

- They provide good learning environments. I knew nothing about cyrus
when I joined the team, and was still unsure about my (minimal) work in
debian. I learned a lot about maintaining a complex package as well as
various other bits of knowledge (one of the other team members taught me
to use SVN as I had never touched a source code management system before).

- It lowers the burden on everyone's shoulders. I can think of many
times where I've seen emails like "This patch from upstream needs to go
in, but I have no time, can someone else do it?" Also stuff in IRC/AIM
like: "I"m heading out the door right now, I've done x and y of task
foo, can you finish up with z".

- It allows for more specialization. While we all work on all of the
package, I tend to do more bug triage and work with the debian
packaging, while others will do more work on the upstream source code.
This lets people work to their talents.

There are others, but the rest that come to mind at the moment are
oft-repeated. I'm sure I missed some.

HTH,
Benjamin

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature


Reply to: