Re: [PROPOSAL v2] Orphaning another maintainer's packages
Andreas Tille writes ("Re: [PROPOSAL v2] Orphaning another maintainer's packages"):
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 01:13:25PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > I think four weeks would be much better. A maintainer might
> > reasonably go abroad for 2-3 weeks - we even have a VAC process for
> > handling absences. (And we don't want to complicate this third-party
> > orphan process with references to VACs.)
>
> I lived under the impression that we were talking about packages which
> were not touched for a *long* time (way longer than four weeks). So we
> had some long waiting time X + 15 additional days proposed by Zack.
Consider the case where a maintainer objects. In that case you're
counting in the previous "long waiting" time a period which the
orphaner probably thinks shows disinterest in the package, but during
which the maintainer may well feel (for part of the time at least)
that the package simply didn't need any attention. So I don't think
counting time-since-last-touched towards the notification period (even
in the moral sense you're now doing) is reasonable.
Also this argument is a form of "this has been waiting for ages so now
it is urgent" which I don't really agree with (unless there's an
actual deadline of course).
Unless we're having some heavyweight process with multiple pings
etc. (which we IMO shouldn't) the way the maintainer might first
discover that someone feels the package needs to be orphaned is by the
ITO bug. The maintainer needs to have a good chance to object.
> We are not talking about stealing packages right at the first day
> of a maintainers VAC, right?
That's not the intent, of course. But if we invent a new process with
objective criteria, it needs to be robust against malicious
interpretation (or indeed careless action which follows the letter of
the rules).
Ian.
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