Dogme05: Team Maintenance

["W. Borgert" <debacle@debian.org>]

Hi,

as a conclusion of many discussions at DebConf5, I propose to
maintain all packages by teams.  A fine way to do this, is by
having a pkg- project at alioth.debian.org.  It is useful to
invite non-DDs, esp. upstream developers and people from Debian
derivatives to participate in such teams.

Assumptions:

I. The most important packages in Debian are maintained by
   teams.  The experience with that modus operandi is very good.

II. Team maintainance gives higher quality packages, as more
    people look at the packaging details.

III. The responsiveness on bug reports is higher, as more people
     can react without having to NMU.  Adjustments between team
     members can slow down this, but this is just a matter of
     agreements inside the team.

IV. Less need to orphan packages, as most teams will not
    collapse, if a single maintainer drops out.  Less work for
    our lion-hearted QA team.

V. If not at least two maintainers can be found for a particular
   package, it is not worthwhile to have it in Debian, at least
   not in a release.  experimental is OK.

VI. The advantages of team maintenance outweigh the problem of
    team maintenance overhead.

VII. Team maintainence helps us to collaborate with upstream
     and derivers.

VIII. Packages not maintained by teams are not to go into
      unstable/testing/stable.

IX. As alioth becomes even more important to Debian, we will
    have to strengthen (HA-ing) this resource.

X. Teams shall meet online or in sauna.  They are allowed to do
   DDR or ballroom dancing.

[Dogme05 is, of course, a pun on Dogme95.]

Cheers,
-- 
Wolfgang Borgert <debacle@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~debacle/