Re: Dogme05: Team Maintenance
On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 15:46 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> It might take a bit longer for the new maintainer
> to be up to speed as compared to when one member of a team gets run over
> by a bus, but that doesn't mean "the project stops".
Team maintenance is only one way to accomplish the goal of uninterrupted
high quality of maintenance for all standard & essential packages.
The PTS allows for non-maintainers of an important package to watch
what's happening without necessarily being directly involved in a formal
team. Perhaps we can reduce the time to come up to speed by encouraging
non-team-maintained packages to be "shadowed" by additional developers
who can then be called upon to NMU as needed? This would entail
watching the bug reports as they come in, trying to figure out what's
wrong, contributing additional info and/or patches to the bug reports if
appropriate, and checking new releases to see what the maintainer has
done and why.
I think it's important not to underestimate the possible consequences of
it "taking a bit longer to come up to speed" when a maintainer of an
important package suddenly disappears. For some values of "a bit", the
project could suffer a fair amount through such a loss. I can't readily
provide an anecdote for when this ever occurred, but I do have a vivid
imagination.
Ben
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