Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
Thijs Kinkhorst <kink@squirrelmail.org> writes:
> On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 17:08 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>> At the very minimum, I believe all base packages (those installed by
>> debootstrap by default) should have co-maintainers.
> This sounds like a good compromise between the two sides of this
> discussion.
packages.qa.debian.org already bugs you to find a co-maintainer if the
package is priority standard or higher. It's a good hint but not
mandatory, which feels about right to me.
I don't really understand what requiring a package to have a co-maintainer
looks like. Do you remove the package from Debian if there's no
co-maintainer? Surely not for base packages. Do you force a
co-maintainer on the package somehow? How? What if someone is just
listed as a co-maintainer but never does anything?
Also, I think this is a little silly for small packages. My experience
with this sort of volunteer work in other areas is that if one person does
nearly all the work on a regular basis, you're not gaining that much by
having a backup. The person who is theoretically the backup isn't up to
speed on the package anyway and is going to be starting roughly as cold as
any other random person out there. And there simply isn't enough work for
two people for a lot of packages.
I think that the energy used to define these sorts of procedures is
probably better used finding a package with a large bug count and
volunteering to work with the maintainer to try to get the bug count down.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: