Re: Attempted summary and thoughts
>Russ Allbery wrote:
>So, here's a possibly weird proposal.
>
>What if we had some mechanism whereby people could indicate interest in
>maintaining a package should anything happen to the current maintainer?
>Have it be as non-confrontational as possible by having it not indicate
>any feeling about whether the package is currently maintained well,
>just a willingness to help should the current maintainer be unable to
>continue for some reason.
I like it. I doubt it will work for one of the reasons below, but I
like it.
>Then, should the package run into any trouble, we'd know whether anyone
>else is actually already in a position to potentially take it over, or
>whether there really isn't anyone who feels like they could do so.
>
>Problems that I see with this right away are:
>
> * The data could easily get stale. I may be willing to help with a
> package right now, but a year from now when it has problems, I may no
> longer be in that position. I'm not sure if some sort of periodic ping
> of "you said you'd be willing to take on all of these; reply if that's
> not still true" would cut it.
Yep, this is the problem I anticipated too.
> * My guess is that if we put this system in place, we'll immediately
> discover that most of our core packages have no backup ready and
> available. But that may be useful information anyway.
I'd be willing to take over ifupdown (though I'd hope for
comaintainers), or doc-debian or lilo (which I could handle by
myself). But not all at the same time. :-) I'd also maintain lynx or
gcc in a pinch though I'd want comaintainers and might not be able to
keep it up for very long solo.
>For example, I (and probably various other people) would register my
>willingness to take over autoconf should Ben ever no longer be in a
>position to maintain it. That doesn't mean that he's doing a bad job
>(he's doing a *great* job so far as I can tell); it's just a note that
>should anything catastrophic happen to him, people don't have to
>scramble to look for a replacement maintainer for that package.
You know, this is a really clever proposal, even if you think it's
"weird". :-)
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