Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] metadata.xml: <changepolicies>
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:43:16
Message-Id: 20100225204222.GN14133@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] metadata.xml: by "Robin H. Johnson"
1 On 24-02-2010 23:41:26 +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
2 > Proposed types:
3 > ---------------
4 > - version-bump
5 > - trivial-version-bump
6 > - trivial-fixes
7 > - fixes
8 > - enhancements
9 > - qa-fixes
10 > - trivial-qa-fixes
11
12 Isn't the QA team by its definition allowed to fix QA issues? If so, I
13 don't see a point in explicitly allowing qa-fixes of any kind, since
14 it's implicit for the QA team that is supposed to do this. For QA its
15 probably good to get people in the loop anyway, so they learn, instead
16 of just find their packages fixed in one way or another.
17
18 In general it feels like if you really want to allow a very high degree
19 of modifications to your ebuilds as "maintainer", perhaps it is better
20 to introduce a special group of ebuilds that have in the best case
21 someone watching over them every now and then, but are not tied to
22 "someone". Almost sounds like "maintainer-needed": looking for someone
23 who really cares about this package, perhaps even users welcome for
24 proxy maintenance.
25
26 Another thing may be just the "maintainer-timeout" thing, that simply
27 says that if the maintainer doesn't respond to requests for a
28 change/update, you are allowed to perform the change. Normal sanity and
29 responsibility rules apply of course. Some bugs just hang around for
30 even years with multiple devs commenting on them, and the maintainers
31 just not responding at all. Seems like in such case a time-out rule
32 says more than a once written metadata element.
33
34 Maybe we just shouldn't try to own something, but rather be the first to
35 say something about it. Maybe we should try to identify (groups of)
36 packages that are way more important than others (think of ... python?)
37 and mark them as needing special care, treatment and barriers before any
38 dev would feel like touching them. Perhaps that would just mean rings
39 of developer ranks where the inner circle is QA or something? The more
40 you are on the outside, the less you are allowed to touch by policy. As
41 learning process, making the thin line of the Gentoo quizes too access
42 all or nothing more fine-grained and hopefully community controlled?
43
44
45 --
46 Fabian Groffen
47 Gentoo on a different level