Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
For the record, I have been favorable to team maintenance for years.
That's why the PTS begs for co-maintainers on packages of priority
standard or higher. That's why I pushed to setup alioth.debian.org.
On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Thomas Hood wrote:
> It turns out that there is no need for them to be hurt at all. Lone
> can carry on working as before and find a co-maintainer who won't get
> in his way. But when Lone falls off his horse he'll be glad that Tonto
> is nearby.
Unfortunately, this is simply not true for many small packages. None of my
packages are maintained in a team. I tried several times to get help for
libdbd-pg-perl and libdbd-mysql-perl but I never got any (except once).
(Now, I should probably move them to pkg-perl on alioth but I haven't
took the time to do that yet)
That is to say: you can't require the actual maintainer to find
co-maintainer by himself.
I do agree that maintaining more packages in team is a good idea but you
can't decide that it's the rule and be done. What you can do however, is
to work in that direction (like I do).
For example, you could have participated in the thread in debian-qa that I
recently started about "Collaborative maintenance", and put your brightest
ideas in the wiki :
http://wiki.debian.org/CollaborativeMaintenance
http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2005/12/msg00026.html
Or more concretely, you can help the maintainers find people to help. I'm
convinced that most maintainers of packages of priority standard or higher
have absolutely nothing against team maintenance but they simply didn't
took the time to organize this. So help them organize the transition !
Find co-maintainers, request an alioth project (or join an already
existing team) and get done with it. Start again with another package...
> In other words, this rule can have only positive effects. :)
The Debian world has no "police" to force the application of any rule.
Governing the Debian world requires common sense, communication skills
and much time !
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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