Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> writes:
> [Russ Allbery]
>> 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.
> Did you miss the point that a package need to rot quite a long time
> before packages are taken out of the hands of a missing or useless
> maintainer?
Maybe that's the problem that you should concentrate on fixing instead of
trying to work around it with a solution that won't necessarily fix it and
which adds pointless overhead to packages that are well-maintained?
> If there is a co-maintainer, he will most likely not wait that long
> before he continue maintenance of the package.
Or maybe he'll be so uninterested in the package since there's never been
anything for him to do that he won't even notice the problem and won't be
any improvement over not having a co-maintainer at all.
> You seem to be talking about a "co-maintainer" whose entire
> responsibility is to be listed in the uploaders field, while I talk
> about co-maintainers which have expressed interest in actually
> maintaining a package. The latter are quite likely to be able to take
> over when the primary maintainer us unable to keep up with his tasks.
I'm pointing out that if you require co-maintainers for small packages,
what you're going to get is a whole bunch of the former. There isn't
enough work for two people, plus people annoyed with the rule will list
co-maintainers in order to make people stop bugging them.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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