Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
* Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> [2005:12:22 08:10 +0100]:
> > > Bureaucracy is often designed to do lots of things "better" and it often
> > > doesn't achieve them. It creates needless hassle, more 'paperwork', and
> > > has very few benefits besides making people feel like they've done
> > > something useful when they haven't.
> >
> > You are saying that requiring people to find co-maintainers is
> > "bureaucracy"? Someone I know well recently got co-maintainers for
> > three of his packages by posting a single message to debian-devel.
>
> I think that what Erinn wants to say is more that *forcing* (or
> putting pressure on) maintainers to find co-maintainers would be
> "bureaucracy".
If something makes people's lives complicated for no gain and makes them
jump through hoops to get the same exact thing done, I consider it
bureaucracy. This rule would qualify under that definition.
> I think that she will however agree that *encouraging* co-maintenance
> for "key" or "important" packages (which is a very vague definition)
> is one of the ways to go. But she will probably be able to say it by
> herself: I'm just interpreting....
Not necessarily. I would encourage team maintenance on either
exceptionally large packages (or groups of small packages) or
packages where the maintainer is unable to handle the amount of work
(bug reports, constant upstream releases, etc.) Conversely, I might also
encourage single-person maintenance on packages with ineffective teams
(see Andrew Suffield's mail about this; he basically covers this
territory.)
The fact that a package is important (note: not referring to Priority
here) is not indicative of the amount of work necessary, nor is it
indicative of the amount of time and expertise a given maintainer has
for it.
--
off the chain like a rebellious guanine nucleotide
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