Re: Dogme05: Team Maintenance
On Tue, August 16, 2005 15:46, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> We should strive to increase what I normally call the bus-factor; how
>> many people need to be run over by a bus before the project stops.
>> And for several of the packages in debian, the count is 1 or less.
>
> That's not true. For several of the packages in Debian, it is true that
> there will be a problem if their maintainer will be run over by a bus.
> However, that in no way means the project "stops". As the past has
> taught us, should something like that happen, there will be people
> willing to take over.
You're missing an important case here: the one where the maintainer isn't
completely absent, but lacks the time to maintain the package in an
optimal manner. There are a lot of valid reasons for this to happen, be it
real-life responsibilities or other tasks within Debian, but it hurts the
quality of the package.
It would not be fair to ditch the maintainer in such a case, but having
more than one adds a lot more continuity to the quality of a package. This
is especially important for packages that are particulary central to
debian, i.e. of high priority. The PTS currently says that "you should
find some co-maintainers" if the package is priority standard or higher; I
would like to see that upgraded that to 'must'.
The argument that a maintainer is currently doing just fine doesn't hold
in my opinion, since being swamped in other areas can happen to anyone,
and can happen unexpectedly when it's too late to get a comaintainer. You
can of course NMU, but that has its problems, and NMU's tend to be only
done for the most pressing issues. A co-maintainer who is familiar with
the package and knows what's going on can do a lot more good than
different people NMUing.
regards,
Thijs
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