Re: [gentoo-dev] Killing herds, again

[Mart Raudsepp]

Ühel kenal päeval, K, 03.04.2019 kell 19:35, kirjutas Michał Górny:
> My goal here is to make sure that we have clear and correct
> information
> about package maintainers.  Most notable, if a package has no active
> maintainer, we really need to have 'up for grabs' issued and package
> marked as maintainer-needed, rather than hidden behind some project
> whose members may not even be aware of the fact that they're its
> maintainers.
>
>
> What do you think?

I agree with most of what was written in the original post, but
regarding this point I'd hate to see packages maintained by a project
that makes sense to be thrown into a generic maintainer-needed.
We need a maintainer-needed project status, and just improve the
tooling to notify this. So similar to what Alec said, but I think it's
fine to throw them into the generic bucket when the maintaining project
was indeed just herd-like.
But I don't think we should do that for projects where it makes sense
to have the packages grouped under a project. A recent example was/is
MATE; an older example is maybe enlightenment.
We could mark projects as maintainer-needed and have a script even add
<!-- maintainer-needed --> comments in metadata.xml (and a matching
script to remove those, once the project status changes); have any
maintainer-needed list generation consider with packages marked as
maintained by such a maintainer-needed project (with some potential
grouping of them together in the list), etc.
This could then also be used to signify huge staffing-needs, even if
someone is sort-of trying to take care of them within that project.

But, as said, I agree with almost everything else mentioned in the
thread starter.


Mart