Re: package ownership in Debian
On 7/29/06, Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:11:03 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> said:
> On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, martin f krafft wrote:
>> also sprach Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
>> [2006.07.28.1737 +0100]:
>> > If Debian had slightly less of a culture of "Keep your hands off
>> > my package", I'd do it here instead.
>>
>> I've been thinking about this a lot for the past week.
>>
>> Is there any way this could be changed?
> Yes, and we could start by really enforcing co-maintainership. Make
> it 100% mandatory for all essential, required and base packages at
> first.
Err, I am not sure co-maintaining packages actually
unequivocally improves packaging quality or response times. There are
teams that work well for a packagfe, and then there are packages
where team maintainence has not worked out.
It won't improve packages from the first day, but in my experience it
has improved the way i can communicate with people. It's easier for me
talk with a member or two in a group and sometimes join them
temporarily and help. The one-man approach, when this one-man is a
freak hurts the project, and when the person is sane and the
package(s) needs more work, you end with a group maintanance even if
itsn't official.
You wrote that there are teams that work well for a package, and then
there are packages where team maintenance has not worked out. These
packages where team maintenance has not worked out were well
maintained by one person before or what? If not, i disagree.
> Co-maintainers are much closer to what is being done in a package
> than joe-random developer. Also, co-maintainership is far less
> prone to fire-and-forget uploads that hose things, and are nicer to
> people who feel very strongly about their packages.
Co-maintainerships require communication, and ability and
desire to share decisions, can result in a culture of "it is someone
elses problem (neat aphorism in german, I believe)", and if the team
does not trust one of the members, then things can turn ugly.
Sometimes, too many cooks do indeed spoil the broth.
I think the debian-installer guys can tell you otherwhise.
> IMO, if we could reach a better level of resilience, lower response
> times, and agility with co-maintainership, it would be better than
> going to the extreme Ubuntu did.
I am not yet convinced that that is the case universally,
especially if you force people to work in teams.
Hello, i thought Debian project was a big team. If people here don't
want to work in a team, we're going nowhere.
I think that force is the wrong term, we should encourage and in some
cases require to avoid single point of failure, IMHO.
regards,
-- stratus
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