Re: Volunteer-initiated team maintenance as a solution for packages with low activity
On Wed, 2012-04-18 at 13:10 -0400, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> So anyway, enough explanation, on to my proposed solution. Seeing as
> team spirit has been a quite effective antidote to stagnation, lets go
> ahead and use that again.
I agree with the general intention, but not with the details of the
proposed process. Indeed, I'm unconvinced we need to formulate a
process of any kind, especially not one that makes a specific group (in
this case, the Alioth admins) responsible for policing it. I would
rather simply see a stronger consensus on what is reasonable behaviour.
It seems to me that creating a detailed process/rules might actually be
negative in many cases, by making the person who is trying to help
explain the problem in a formal way, thus creating a confrontation with
the existing maintainer, who will almost inevitably feel wronged, and
want to explain that things are not as bad as they seemed, that they
really hope to get more time soon, etc.
If we need a process at all, I would initially suggest something like
the following, which I think would be enough to solve many cases:
- Where there are problems with a package that are not being dealt with
by the maintainer, it is acceptable for others to NMU. This includes
when a package is significantly out of date compared to upstream, though
in this case it is recommended that the DELAYED queue be used.
- Where several NMUs for a package enter the archive over an extended
period without the maintainer acknowledging them in a new maintainer
upload, it is acceptable for others to add themselves as maintainers for
the package, even without the permission of the current maintainer.
But I repeat that I think that forming a consensus on reasonable
behaviour is more important than designing a process for this issue.
--
Moray
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