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Re: Question to Stefano, Steve and Luk about the organisation into packaging teams.



Hi,

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 01:42:11AM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 01:19:27PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> >Dear Stefano, Steve and Luk,
> 
> Hi again Charles!
> 
> >I like a lot Stefano's statement about collaborative maintainance:
> >"Collaborative maintenance should not be mandatory (we do have several very
> >efficient one-man-band developers), but should be our default".
> >
> >First of all, I would be interested to know if it is a point of divergence
> >between the candidates. Then, if there is interest for such a discussion, I
> >would like to encourage you to develop your ideas on this subject, especially
> >on what you can do as a DPL or DPL assistant. 
> 
> I'm very much a fan of people working together on their packages, but
> I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to make teams the default. If

I think for the vast majority of packages in our archive this would
simply be overkill. But I'm interested what you think about the
following:

In Debian we have some packages that are either by default on every
system or are commonly expected to be found on Debian systems. Such
tools could be called the core of our system, because they are most
commonly used on a Debian system. Such packages include coreutils, gzip,
grep, hostname, initscripts, obviously all the tools that make up a
Debian system like dpkg, at, cron and some more. Short said: More or
less all packages with a priority of Standard or higher, although one
would need to think about this scope wrt to the following proposal.

Some of these packages are very well maintained and others.. well,
bug numbers sometimes speak for themselves. For these packages we have
that cool text on the PTS pages: "The package is of priority standard
or higher, you should really find some co-maintainers." which brought
me on this at all. What I thought about when I read that is: "HaHaHa,
we are kidding on us own, because we recommend something to us, what
should actually be the default (for this type of packages).
Thats why I thought it would eventually be a good idea to form a core
team, meaning a team of a bunch of people (10-20?), with wide-spread
knowledge and known to have enough free time (e.g. people who have > 50
packages and aren't able to keep up with the bug reports in their own
packages wouldn't qualify) that gets the job to (co-)maintain all these
packages that are very important to us. It doesn't mean that the
existing maintainers are taken away the packages, because they could
still stay the maintainers, but obviously some of these packages are not
easily maintainable by one person.

What do you think about such a proposal?

Best Regards,
Patrick

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