On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 05:03:56PM +0000, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> I have only talked about the re-admission of people to the project.
> When someone wants to join again, you obviously look at what kind of
> work they did in the past. [...]
> I said, in a nutshell, that generally people who've
> retired can simply get added again, and that others have to do more
> checks.
So, is it possible for them to fail these checks? If one of them is:
"Last time you were in Debian, you dropped out of contact for six months,
your packages got NMUed and orphaned, and your account got disabled after
you didn't reply to a maintainer ping. Are you going to do better this time?"
"Probably not."
are we going to say "Well, then screw you." and not allow them to do
uploads? What's that achieving apart from throwing away the contribution
they would've made in the months before they flaked out?
The alternate way of looking at this -- which TBH, is closer to what
I'd've expected from Martin -- is, if we're not going to reject these
people, or force them through a n-m process they've already passed,
that we should be offering some more focussed advice for new-maintainers
that've been known to flake out; eg encouraging them to co-maintain
their packages so that their co-maintainers will be able to keep the
package maintained if they disappear, or similar.
But the corollary to that view is that this isn't a way of "protecting
ourselves" from slack maintainers -- because we're just offering help
to them, if they refuse that, that's their own choice. OTOH, that's
not to say we don't have any protection: that's what the QA group and
NMUs provide.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we could.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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