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On Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:44:49 -0500 |
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NP-Hardass <NP-Hardass@g.o> wrote: |
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> With all of the unclaimed herds and unclaimed packages within them, I |
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> started to wonder what will happen after the GLEP 67 transition |
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> finally comes to fruition. This left me with some concerns and I was |
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> wondering what the community thinks about them, and some possible |
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> solutions. |
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> |
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> There is a large number of packages from unclaimed herds that, at this |
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> time, look like they will not be claimed by developers. This will |
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> likely result in a huge increase in maintainer-needed packages (and |
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> subsequent package rot). This isn't to say that some of these |
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> packages weren't previously in a "maintainer-needed" like state, but |
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> now, they will explicitly be there. |
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I don't understand why you're turning this problem upside-down. |
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The problem was, is and will be that packages are unmaintained. Not |
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that stats show that they are many. |
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It's better to have packages maintainer-needed than 'maintained' by |
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developers who ignore bugs, requests and basically act as showstoppers |
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for people who want to fix stuff. |
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> A possible approach to reducing this is to adopt some new policies. |
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> |
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> The first of which is an "adopt-a-package" type program. In |
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> functionality, this is no different than proxy-maintenance, however, |
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> this codifies it into an explicit policy whereby users are encouraged |
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> to step and take over a package. This obviously requires a greater |
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> developer presence in the proxy-maint project (or something similar), |
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> but, personally, I think that a stronger dev presence in proxy-maint |
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> would be better for Gentoo as a whole. |
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That's not really a change. Additional advertisement at best. |
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> The second policy change would be that maintainer-needed packages can |
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> have updates by anyone while maintaining the standard "you fix it if |
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> you break it" policy. This would extend to users as well. With the |
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> increased ease that users can contribute via git/github, they should |
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> be encouraged to contribute and have their efforts facilitated to ease |
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> contributions to whatever packages they desire (within the |
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> maintainer-needed category). |
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This is already the case. |
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> Similar to the concept of a "bugday," coupled with above, an |
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> "ebuildday" where users and devs get together so users can learn to |
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> write ebuilds and for devs to work together to maintain packages that |
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> usually fall outside their normal workload could prove beneficial to |
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> the overall health of Gentoo packaging. |
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> |
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> Once again, these are just some random musings inspired by recent |
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> events on the dev ML, and thought it might be worth discussing. |
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> I've cc'd proxy-maint as a lot of this discussion is likely to involve |
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> them, and would like them to put in their official opinion as well. |
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If you want to do some fun coding, here's my idea: find reverse |
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dependencies of maintainer-needed packages, and try to convince |
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the maintainers of those revdeps to take those packages. After all, |
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those revdeps require the packages, and are going to benefit from them |
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being maintained. |
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|
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-- |
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Best regards, |
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Michał Górny |
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<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/> |
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