On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 11:32:33AM +0000, Owen Dunn wrote: > As I've understood it, the only thing that has really been required in > the past of a maintainer (beyond any initial packaging) is to act as a > clearing house for bug reports and feature requests. And that is a mistake. It leads to too many un- and under-maintained junk packages which it is difficult to fix or remove. > Many people working on Debian are students and have lots of time; some > of them (and God only knows how) have the time actively to maintain > many packages and still keep up with the mailing lists. Many, though, > have full-time jobs, copious other interests, a bevy of other free > software projects, and so on, and weeks may go by where they are > genuinely too busy with other things to contribute to Debian. If you > feel that's a lack of commitment and that they shouldn't be > maintaining packages, I disagree. And I disagree with you. If a person is overloaded at some point, he should relinquish the package, at least temporarily. I see no benefit in remaining a chokepoint soley to retain the "maintainer" label. Even without a bevy of packages with his name on them, he can retain developer status and engage in bug fixing and NMUing *when he has time.* The difference is that a busy maintainer often prevents anyone from working on the package in a timely fashion, whereas a busy developer doing NMU's as time permits interferes with no one. -- Mike Stone
Attachment:
pgpW3m7yYenXe.pgp
Description: PGP signature