[gentoo-dev] RFC: Project proposal -- maintainer-wanted

[Mart Raudsepp]

Hello,

I have had this project in my mind for a while, so it's about time to
get it out there, as to see if feedback finds it a good one - and if
that is so, if there are people who want to make it happen.
It is worded as a hypothetical project description for the purpose of
the text perhaps being a draft for the projects official description. So
in the following text instead of terms like "this project would be" I'm
purposely using terms like "this project is", as while writing it, it
got quickly very awkward writing "would be" and such all the time.
Please take it still as a proposal to be judged, commented, improved,
etc etc. And well, do that commenting and improving and volunteering ;)


Project maintainer-wanted
=========================

Abstract:
There are currently quite some package requests (over 3000) languishing
on bugzilla waiting for a developer or team to get interested and
package it in the official gentoo-x86 portage tree. However in quite
some cases that might not happen for quite a while even with very
popular packages desired by users. The purpose of the maintainer-wanted
project is to get as many of such packages to the official tree as
possible as a stopgap solution.



Details/implementation:

The maintainer-wanted team is actively looking for popular packages in
bugzilla that have been waiting for packaging in the official
"gentoo-x86" tree for a while, and package and maintain as many of them
as the project teams manpower allows without sacrificing quality.

To decide which libraries/application get packaged in the official tree
by the project, various factors can be considers by the team. These can
include metrics such as:
* bugzilla vote count amongst open maintainer-wanted packages
* recent general useful activity on the packages bugzilla entry
* past and present user community activity in providing ebuild
improvements, version bumps and fixes in the packages bugzilla
maintainer-wanted bug entry
* ease of the packaging thanks to active user contributions or
consistently good upstream packaging making the workload of the
maintainer-team not grow much
* team members interest and personal qualification in the type of the
package and its packaging methods
* ...


maintainer-wanted maintained packages are seen as a stopgap solution. As
such it is desired that eventually a team or developer takes over
maintenance to provide the packages dedicated care and free up the
maintainer-wanted team to make available more desired packages that do
not yet have a dedicated maintainer. To achieve that, various methods
are pursued:

* Other teams and developers are encouraged to take over maintenance.
This includes proxy maintenance when for example a user is found to
consistently and with good quality help out the maintainer-wanted team
in providing fixes, improvements and bumps to an in-tree
maintainer-wanted maintained package. Taking over maintenance is as easy
as for maintainer-needed packages, however a notification to and
acknowledgment from a maintainer-wanted team member is appreciated.

* Lists of maintainer-wanted packages are generated, sorted by category
of interest. Developers and dedicated package teams are encouraged to
find packages of interest from these lists and take over maintenance.

* Simply the easier availability (and the resulting exposure) of a
package in the official tree (as opposed to an unreviewed, yet possibly
high quality, ebuild attached to bugzilla, which has thousands of such
entries) could catch the interest of another team or developer and they
are encouraged to take over maintenance when they have the capacity
(manpower/time etc)


In other ways the maintainer-wanted team is not significantly different
to other package maintaining teams:
* The project is responsible for their maintained packages. Quality is
not sacrificed; bugs on in-tree packages get acted upon, etc. As such it
is likely desired to have a different alias than the default one for new
packages (or a different good means of differentiating), as to not have
bugs against already in-tree packages get lost amongst the hundreds or
thousands of packages still waiting to get into the official package
tree.
* In-tree maintainer-wanted packages are also tried to be kept up to
date in regards to new stable upstream versions. Users are encouraged to
file bump requests on bugzilla even as 1-day requests due to the
diversity of packages maintained by the project and therefore too many
different places and notification mechanisms to manually check and
monitor for the team (bugzilla version bump requests solve the
diversity); at least until no mechanisms exist for automatic checking of
bumps, which could get implemented in the future.


The maintainer-team project hopes to make previously directly
unavailable popular packages of quality easily available to the user
base until other projects and developers are able to take over.


----

Discuss! :)

Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio@g.o
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio