On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 02:29:13PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > Can we come up with some way whereby the maintainership authority is > always shared, somehow ? The net result of this would be that anyone who maintains packages in Debian will do so as part of a team. Likely, people maintaining more than one package will end up being part of several teams. In such a hypothetical world you seem to be persuaded that, within all those teams, people will generally learn to work together amicably and find ways to avoid stepping on each other toes. This definitely matches my teamwork experience in Debian --- Sometimes you, as a team member, are confident you're doing the right thing, and will just go ahead and make a change. Sometimes you'll have doubts and ask before acting. Sometimes you'll screw things up, and either you'll clean up after yourself or someone else will do so for you (when this happens, cursing will be involved). So my question here is: why would someone who has learned to work amicably *within* the boundaries of several teams, will behave any different *across* those boundaries, when contributing to packages that belong to other teams? I think the behavior will be the same. So, if we go down this path, I'm not sure why we should stop at teams, instead of just having the de facto equivalent of "Maintainer: Debian" for all packages. *Of course* there will be conflicts, but it is absolutely not clear to me why they would be any worse, or any more frequent, than the conflicts we have today within (potentially very large) teams. [ As a caveat: the "Maintainer" field currently acts as both a contact point for a given package, and as "fences" separating who is allowed to contribute without asking for permission and who should ask first. I'm advocating only against the latter meaning, not the former. But the former can be implemented in other ways. For instance, Nicolas Dandrimont pointed me to the fact that Fedora uses as contact point a list of the most recent N committers to any given package. Which sounds like a great solution. ] Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . zack@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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