Re: [gentoo-dev] Packages masked for lack of maintainer, but metadata.xml says otherwise

[Alec Warner]

2012/2/2 Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chithanh@g.o>:
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> Mike Frysinger schrieb:
>> On Thursday 02 February 2012 17:56:16 Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
>> wrote:
>>> there have been a number of packages masked lately due to lack
>>> of maintainer. However, their metadata.xml does not list
>>> maintainer-needed@g.o which I think should be the first step in
>>> searching for a new maintainer.
>>
>> if there is no <herd> and no <maintainer>, then
>> "maintainer-needed@g.o" is implicit.  why do we need to explicitly
>> list it ? -mike
>
> If that is the case, then removing would also be ok. But my point was
> that the packages still had other maintainers listed.

I want to avoid setting rules in stone. We are not correctly tooled,
trained, or have any kind of vigor for that sort of approach.
Metadata.xml is a useful guide to knowing who might care (have cared?)
about a package. It is not 100% accurate despite the efforts of the
developer community. When buggy software is buggy for months (nay,
years?) it is treecleaner policy to mask it. Casting about for
maintainers is sometimes useful. You see the undertakers do this often
when retiring individuals. That being said, the quickest way to get a
response from the community is to mask it and wait for someone who
cares to step up, ergo the policy to mask packages we cannot find time
to fix.

For reference, the list of developers who are listed as active but
have not committed anything in gentoo-x86 'recently' is around 95. I
am set to eventually retire 33 of them (still getting some bugs out of
the scripts.)

The entire list is (active) + (inactive) or (162) + (95). Obviously
not everyone in the inactive list is really inactive (the limit afaik
is 30d) but the point is that even if the metadata.xml lists someone
there is a 1 in 3 chance that they may not be following closely
anyway. Developers on devaway are a similar issue
(https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338829)

-A

>
>
> Best regards,
> Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
>
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