Re: [gentoo-project] Council: Policy for Systemd units

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
<chithanh@g.o> wrote:
> I was always under the general impression that a maintainer is free to
> do whatever he likes with his package within policy. When p.mask'ed even
> outside policy to some degree. If you disagree with how a package is
> maintained, you are welcome to fork the ebuild and do it better.

Sure, but there is more than one maintainer - the original one, and
the one who signed up because the original one was being stubborn.
They're both welcome to do whatever they want within policy.  However,
the users don't exactly benefit from daily revision wars.

Maintainers don't have the right to exclude others from also being
maintainers, and when they do become maintainers they have all the
rights the original maintainer had.  Nobody owns a package.

Bottom line is that bad things happen when developers become stubborn
and don't cooperate.  However, the fact that maintainers aren't
cooperating isn't a reason to delay progress.  You can't give every
developer a veto on every project in Gentoo or nothing will get done.
If the standing policies aren't working for somebody they can always
go to Council - that's what it is there for.  The standing policies
say that anybody can maintain anything, and when it gets bigger than
that you have projects that elect leads.

Rich