Re: What to do about negligent maintainers?
]] Charles Plessy
| This package-centric point of view ensure that the RC bugs are fixed
| by either correction or removal. The punitive approaches like
| orphaning the package or expelling the maintainer are not fixing the
| bugs and therefore increase the entropy with no benefit, in my
| opinion.
I think it's about having some reasonable level of maintenance, and it's
about holding DDs to the same (or a similar) standard as we hold other
maintainers. Orphaning packages is a way of getting somebody to pick
them up and give them the necessary attention, it's not a way of
punishing the maintainer. As for kicking people out, I don't think that
has been suggested by anyone and as we have seen in other cases, it's
not something to be done lightly.
| Given that for some (most?) of the packages maintained by Anìbal I
| have not seen attempts to takeover, I think that it is difficult to
| decide whether his maintainership is detrimental to the package, or in
| contrary better than nothing.
There was at least one person who helped out quite a bit with
nfs-common, but got tired of co-maintaining as it was a continous uphill
struggle where the maintainer quite often broke stuff and didn't
coordinate. Maybe he could have hijacked it and gotten away with it,
but he didn't do that. So while this approach might work in some cases,
it's not a sure recipe for success.
I'd rather not have this discussion be about a specific maintainer. I
think this is a systemic problem where we are bad at discovering when
maintainers don't really maintain their packages that well any longer,
be it because they have lost interest, are overworked or something
else. What can we do to prevent this and when it happens, fix it?
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
Reply to: