Re: Making better use of multiple maintainers
>> Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> writes:
> - Bugs could get fixed sooner since more people are working on the
> package. This would help us meeting our release goals.
The Mythical Man Month, of which Debian is exemplary[0]. "Given enough
eyes, all bugs are shallow", of which Debian is also exemplary, is a
another, prettier, way of saying "men and months are interchangeable
commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers
*with no communication among them*". It doesn't mean "throw more
people at a problem and it will get solved faster".
Your idea is practicable iff the group of maintainers actually
communicate with each other, that is, the package is actually jointly
maintained. Let me take two of my own packages as an example:
* wmaker. It's not a complex package, but it operates under several
different conditions (or enviroments) which are different enough
from each other that makes it imposible for me to gain expertise
in all of them (IOW, I don't use wmaker with GNOME, and it's very
time consuming for me to try to figure out ways of reproducing
bugs under those conditions, given the *absolutely* *wonderful*
and *marvelous* documentation GNOME and its packages have)
* celestia. Simple. Very limited scope. Not many configuration
options.
Would I like to find a co-maintainer for wmaker? Yes. Celestia? No.
My criteria for considering co-maintainership is simple: "Can I cover
all the possible ways of using this package myself?"
[0] We never finished that conversation at Linux Tag.
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