Proposal: have NM and DM sign a package maintainer pledge
Hello,
I would like that all future package maintainers sign the following
pledge during their acceptance process. It tries to define a minimal
and common set of expectations among all package maintainers. This
draft has been reviewed by several DD in the trip back from Debconf
and I think it's quite good already. Once it's good enough, I'd welcome
DAM/FD/DM-team to ensure that each person that is granted upload rights
has signed this text.
----
As a package maintainer, I will do my best to help the Debian project
release a stable version of our operating system. In particular, I will
work together with the release team and I will keep all packages
associated to my name free of release critical bugs. To this effect, if
I'm not registered as being busy or in vacation, I will start working on
my release critical bugs as soon as possible (in less than 1 week in
common cases). If I can't deal with them in a timely fashion, I will state
it clearly in the associated bug reports, tag them help and invite other
contributors either to provide a patch or to do a non-maintainer upload.
If I do not manage to handle release critical bugs in the above described
way, or if I almost never deal with any of my RC bugs by myself, I will:
• not refuse help and even propose co-maintainance to good contributors
• recognize my failure and actively try to find a new maintainer and/or
co-maintainers
• not complain if the quality assurance team decides to orphan the package
I recognize that my work is not limited to unstable. I will also work with
the stable release team and the security team to provide updated packages
for the stable and/or testing distribution when some issues deserve it.
I am aware of the limits of my skills and my available time and I will
avoid packaging software that I would not be able to maintain properly.
----
Comments welcome.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
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