Re: MIA Maintainer Process Proposal
Patrick Ouellette writes ("MIA Maintainer Process Proposal"):
> Attached is a proposal for dealing with MIA maintainers.
Can I make a suggestion for some `patter' that might be helpful ?
Remember that the purpose of having an MIA maintainer procedure is not
to punish developers who've suddenly found other things in their life
taking a higher priority than Debian.
The purpose is to stop the maintainer's lack of response (permanent or
temporary) from preventing other developers from fixing problems and
helping to improve the distribution, and to ensure that Debian's
systems don't have lots of `stale' access control information.
It should be made clear that failure to meet the timescales in the
document does not necessarily make someone a poor developer.
For example, consider this one:
> Security issues: immediate response ( < 24 hours )
Clearly one can't reasonably demand of any individual volunteer to
give that level of response (though it's nice when people do). But,
as a project, that's the level of response we should be aiming at.
That means that our *process* needs to be able to take the strain, and
allow our large numbers of people to fill this kind of gap.
The converse of this, of course, is that people should not feel
slighted if someone NMU's their packages. Provided the proper NMU
procedure is followed (particularly wrt documenting everything in the
BTS) they should feel helped (I know I do, but then I'm terminally
lazy sometimes). If they don't like something in the NMU they can
always change it back themselves.
Ian.
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