On Wednesday, December 07, 2016 11:21:23 AM Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > 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. ] I feel a personal sense of responsibility towards the packages where I appear as Maintainer or in Uploaders. In my mind, adding myself there represents both authority to make decisions and responsibilities. Take that away and I do believe I'll feel less responsible and less motivated. For packages maintained by myself or in ~small teams, things like work flow and tools are tractable in a way they aren't for the project as a whole. While our current system has disadvantages, I have yet to see a better alternative proposed. Scott K
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