Re: [gentoo-dev] Time based retirements

On 12/20/12 7:21 PM, Doug Goldstein wrote:
> I'm curious who had the brain dead idea to retire Gentoo developers
> that are still interested in the distro, that maintain low activity
> packages for herds that are stretched way too thin, and are still
> contributing to the distro in many ways other than direct CVS commits
> (e.g. overlays, user support, providing hardware to other devs, etc).

Dough, thank you for rising the issue.

I'm receiving the undertakers@ e-mail, so I have a pretty good view of
what's happening.

I have several suggestions how we can improve things:

1. 3 months is too short period anyway.

2. Think through what the goals are. We do not want to retire as many
people as possible. We do not want to frustrate people who do contribute
to Gentoo. We do not want to discourage people who consider becoming new
developers. At least I don't.

3. I think what's important is to keep packages maintained. I consider
maintainership to be a duty, not a privilege. If someone is listed in
metadata.xml, but is not really maintaining the package, that creates a
formal illusion that the package is maintained, and may prevent other
people from stepping up and taking maintenance of that package.

4. I suggest that we focus on the above: keeping packages maintained.
Taking packages out of hands of inactive/overworked maintainers is good.
They can always become _more_ active, which is easier if they retain cvs
access. If they make a single commit every 3-6 months, I'm fine with
that as long as things are maintained properly.

5. Remember that cvs/bugzilla activity is not the only way of
contributing. It's probably most tanglible and very needed, but let's
not reduce real people and their real world situations, and their effort
to contribute to just dates and numbers.

Paweł