Re: Self-assessment of the quality of the maintenance work
Hi Raphaël,
I like your proposal in principle, but I see some problem with
group maintenance. While I'm in principle a supporter of group
maintenance I do not see how it should work with your proposal.
Who in the group will be addressed by your proposal? You are
talking about a "passive" maintainer in the case of the Perl
maintainers group. How do you obtain whether a group or a
"passive" maintainer is working?
Do you just want to parse the list of Maintainer / Uploaders
and leave out generic group addresses? Or how should this
work? The problem in non-working teams is that every member
trusts all the others and finally nothing will be done in
case a problem occures. How do you want to address this
problem?
BTW, when writing this an idea comes up which might be also
able to measure responsiveness of maintainers: How long does
it take until a bug deserves at least an answer from one
of the maintainers. Most probably this needs some clever
interpretation of the answers to a bug. IMHO any bug deserves
an answer in a short time span - even the submitter of a
wishlist bug deserves a notice if the maintainer thinks that
this bug will not fixed in the next couple of monthes and
give some reasons why. IMHO bug #432350 is a good example
for a non-working team. There is not a single response from
team members - but finally the team got new blood now and
there is some hope. IMHO this bug report would have deserved
a response like: "We are not able to fix this problem because
we are completely occupied with other tasks. Please help."
and setting the help tag. This "answer" would perhaps have
brought the fresh blood the team gets now some monthes
earlier.
Considering this example - I'm sure there are much more -
leads me to the opinion that watching BTS for unanswered
bug reports might enable us to detect MIA maintainers.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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