Re: long term goals of debian membership
On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Ben Collins wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 12:23:31PM -0500, Neal H Walfield wrote:
> <snip>
> > winning way. Again, no one forces anyone to be here and when someone no
> > longer want to be here, that person leaves.
>
> No, they just go MIA, and leave their responsibilities and account unused.
> Not very many maintainers (in fact only 3 I can think of in the 2 years I
> have been with Debian) actually take themselves out of the project. This
> is a management problem for accounts, and a security risk (because the
> accounts are not being used, or checked).
We could automaticly disable logins on accounts of people who have not
logged on in some time.
> IMO, if we curve the number of people going into the NM queue, by setting
> up goals for them before they even get there, then we will have a faster,
> more capable set of NM administrators. Because then they will be able to
> easily determine who is right for the job. They wont have to process every
> joe shmoe that sends an email, since those people will go through a
> "trial period" (sort of a filter, if you will), before hand.
Developers come and go, packages accumulate. Nothing you do to the NM
system is going to change this, though it may be possible to deferr the
problem by taking advantage of the fact that at present, the number of
maintainers is growing faster than the number of abandoned packages. I
bet if instead of making any rules, you simply requested that if NMs want
to introduce new packages, they also take the trouble to adopt at least
one orphaned package for each new package they introduce, the majority
would honor your request.
Out of curiosity, do we have any procedures for allowing packages to
gracefully leave debian altogether (other that RC bugs at realease time,
which isn't so graceful)? Something like marking a package which no one
wants to maintain because it is buggy and obsoleted by another package as
depricated for users?
Britton
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