On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 06:19:26PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> I would like to propose something new that would partially supersede
> the work done by the MIA team and that would also generate new
> information somehow related to the topic of WNPP.
Well, I like the principle (who having a feeling of QA problems in
Debian wouldn't?) but I don't think the mechanism you are proposing
would work at all.
- the first time you'll ask people to fill the forms the mechanism
will suck up a lot of time to everybody. As the benefits for the
filler are not clear (at least not yet) they wouldn't be motivated
to spend the required time
- the "fear" of getting bothered/pinged periodically via mail is
something which is real among maintainers (remember all the fuss
about DDPO via email? I think the fuss was inappropriate, but still
it was there). This is another ingredient which will contribute "bad
marketing" to such an initiative.
Unfortunately, I have the feeling that your proposal will work
properly only if an amount of people close to everybody will take part
in it, otherwise it won't be that useful, because most likely only the
active people will take part in it.
Alternative proposal
--------------------
If the goal is cleaning up the maintainer/uploaders field I've an
alternative proposal which is, IMO of course, more likely to work
properly and do not require active work from the single maintainer. It
boils down to automatically filling the Uploaders field on the basis
of debian/changelog. (The idea is shamelessly copied from the GNOME
team.)
That would be an inherent, always up to date wrt contributions measure
of who worked on a given package recently. The outcome wouldn't be as
fine-grained as yours (passive / backup / ...), but it would be
automated.
What it would be needed (warning: braindump ahead) is:
- implementing it in some low-level tool, because we can't rely on
CDBS class, it should (if agreed upon via something like a DEP) be
fully automatica
- decide the thresholds for being listed in Uploaders
Orthogonal problems
-------------------
After writing the above, I realized there are two orthogonal
problems. One is cleaning up Uploaders, which I believe would be
addressed by the above approach.
The other is identifying de facto orphaned packages. For that you can
indeed ping, but it can be way easier than what you propose. Just send
an email (with no web link whatsover), at most once per year, and only
mentioning packages which have not been touched by the maintainer for
more than 1 year. The reply can be formatted enabling the maintainer
to mention which packages she still maintains.
No reply = orphaned package.
Actually, your proposal mentions MIA, I don't get why. A maintainer
can have de facto orphaned some packages and still be active on
others.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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