Re: Self-assessment of the quality of the maintenance work
Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Sune Vuorela wrote:
>> On 2008-12-20, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:
>>> maintainer receives a mail with a link to a web form where he'll have a
>>> list of all the packages that he maintains/co-maintains and for each
>>> package he has to answer several questions that explain his relationship
>>> with the package (the answer are preseeded with the values he selected
>>> the previous time so that he can quickly skim over it if nothing has
>>> changed):
>>> - what kind of maintainer he is
>>> - active (responding quickly, forwarding bugs, ???)
>>> - passive (responds only to major problems)
>>> - backup (not doing anything unless solicited)
>>> - if the package needs an active maintainer or not (most perl modules are
>>> well maintained with a single "passive" maintainer)
>>> - if the package needs help from another volunteer
>>>
>>> We could integrate various heuristics/data in the process to help the
>>> maintainer recognize that he's (not) keeping up and that he needs help
>>> or maybe that he's no more "active" but only "passive".
>>>
>>> If the maintainer doesn't respond, he automatically enters the MIA
>>> process and the package is quickly marked as needing help/attention
>>> from someone else.
>> I'd rather spend my time on fixing my packages than on filling web forms
>> with bureaucratic bullshit.
>
> Thanks for your constructive comments… and the nice vocabulary.
>
> It might take some time the first time that you submit but it's good to
> step back a few seconds to think about the maintenance status of the
> packages that you maintain (do I need help? do I maintain it actively or
> would I let the package go if someone more involved in the upstream
> project showed up?). Later on the bureaucratic work takes a couple
> of seconds, not much more than the time you spent to write you nice reply.
I don't think sending active maintainers questionaires is very helpful.
Though I'm not a priori against such a self-assessment, I think it
should at least only be sent to people when needed (not in case of VAC,
not when clearly active on all packages, not when all packages are
orphaned ...).
Cheers
Luk
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