Team maintenance and personal responsibility
Hi Java team,
I would like to point to a few problems that I see in the functioning of the
Java packaging team. This is probably not news to anyone, but some things
are worth repeating from time to time. Please view this as an attempt at
constructive discussion. These are my observation after working on the Java
team for a few months:
*Team maintenance should not imply a lack of personal ownership of the
packages. It would be very helpful if those who are listed as "Uploaders"
would take their responsibility job as seriously as if they
were "Maintainer". This includes:
- responding to and fixing bugs,
- packaging new upstream versions, and
- RETIRING from active maintenance by removing yourself from the Uploaders
field if you lose interest in the package.
This last point is rather important. Some packages have gone without
attention for a long time although several people are listed as Uploaders.
(Examples are perhaps unnecessary.) In some cases all Uploaders appear to
be MIA. The result is that we have plenty of packages that are effectively
orphaned, but nobody will notice because they are maintained by the nice
big Debian Java Packaging Team.
Retiring from maintainership could be effected by simply changing the
control file in SVN so that it will be corrected in the next upload. (I
guess it would be overkill to make a new upload only for this.)
*Please commit your packaging work to SVN even if you are the sole Uploader
for the package. Someone else may want to help out and will need the latest
version.
That's all, thanks for your great work and let's continue working to make
Debian the best Java platform.
Regards,
Marcus
Reply to: