Hi,
Quoting Ian Jackson (2016-12-05 23:04:48)
> Tollef Fog Heen writes ("Re: Replace the TC power to depose maintainers [and 1 more messages]"):
> > A similar proposal: Have a way of declaring the package to be under
> > collective maintenance (put it under collab-maint on alioth +
> > Maintainer: collective@debian.org or somesuch?) That'd move closer to a
> > model where individuals don't own that particular package.
I very much like that idea.
What I currently find inconvenient about the LowThresholdNmu page is, that it
is external to the source package. So after having found a package I want to
fix I have to manually look up on that wiki page whether the maintainer is fine
with NMUs and if it applies to the source package at hand. It would be great if
that information could somehow live inside the source package.
People who would favor this approach probably already have their packaging SCM
in collab-maint or use dgit, so I'm more wondering about a good way of how to
encode this information in source packages themselves and what it means to put
it there.
Suppose, we'd just put something like collective@debian.org into the Maintainer
field. What would it actually mean? Would it be sufficient to mean that the
declarations from the LowThresholdNmu page apply? And would it have to be an
actually active email address? Would it maybe have to be like for team
maintained packages where an actual human address still has to be in the
Uploaders field? I also see some overlap with the packages@qa.debian.org value
for the Maintainer field.
> This is all very well and good, but frankly, Lars (and the others in this
> conversation) are not the problem. The problem maintainers won't put
> themselves on a LowThresholdAdoption list either.
>
> We already have ways of dealing with maintainers who are simply
> absent or busy, and not actively resisting. Our processes for that
> are rather cumbersome but it is possible to use them effectively.
>
> What we lack is a way of dealing with maintainers who are determined
> not to lose control of their packages. (And I do mean "control".)
I think the thread has derailed here a little bit but I think that Lars and
Tollef are aware that their proposals are orthogonal to the problem you brought
up in your original message. I think this sub-thread is now about how to change
the culture in Debian to one where we are (even more) more encouraging towards
weak-ownership of packages. I took the liberty to adjust the subject line
accordingly.
Thanks!
cheers, josch
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