Re: Idea for maintaining packages up for adoption
[ Moving the discussion to debian-qa where it belongs, setting the
reply-to accordingly ]
Le mardi 12 juillet 2005 à 11:58 +0200, Frank Lichtenheld a écrit :
> I think you are mixing two things here that should not be mixed,
> sponsoring non-DDs and handling orphaned packages. Either a package
> has a maintainer (even it is not a DD) who takes the responsibility
> for keeping track of its bugs and updates or it has not.
Yes.
> The idea of setting up a general sponsoring alioth project where
> some DDs try to sponsor people even for packages they don't care about
> (otherwise they would probably already sponsor the possible maintainer)
> is interesting and that could definitely work.
Indeed.
But the primary purpose of this site is to let outsiders maintain Debian
packages which are unmaintained/orphaned. The sponsorship comes
afterwards just a way to integrate the package into Debian and not as a
way to "mentor" the outsider (although quality checks and feedback are
encouraged!).
> On the other hand trying to coordinate the maintainance of orphaned
> packages more is certainly a good idea, too (even though I don't think
> there is a real need for this currently).
I agree with you, it's probably not needed because not so many people
work on orphaned packages ... but part of this explication is that
there's no easy way to work on a package without being required to
upload your changes at the end even if you only plan to fix little
things.
Using SVN would let one fix one or two minor bugs in a few minutes,
leaving the upload for someone else later when more changes have been
aggregated.
> But we should _not_ mix packages that have a maintainer and those that
> have not.
At the infrastructure level I don't see why we'd have to differentiate
them. Both can use the same subversion repository...
But I agree that they should be differentiated somewhere because
packages without maintainer must be marked as such everywhere in order
to try to grab the attention of potential helpers.
On the other hand, a package maintained by a non-DD must also be
advertised as such so that regular DD have a chance to jump in and
become a co-maintainer with the "non-DD maintainer". He would then be
his logical sponsor too.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com
Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
Earn money with free software: http://www.geniustrader.org
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