Re: [gentoo-dev] Some ideas on how to reduce territoriality

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Sat, 2007-08-04 at 01:23 +0300, Petteri Räty wrote:
> Chris Gianelloni kirjoitti:
> > More and more, I am finding developers who are afraid to touch packages
> > for even minor things if they're not the maintainer.  This is a sad
> > state of affairs and not the reason we have maintainers.  We have
> > maintainers to assure that a package is being taken care of, not to
> > establish some kind of "territory" over that package.  Because of this
> > misconception, I would like to come up with and document a listing of
> > things that any ebuild developer can feel free to do to any package
> > *without* maintainer consent.  These are generally all minor things, but
> > things that I think are important.  I'm going to list off the things
> > that I can think of, and encourage everyone else to speak up if I've
> > missed something.
> >
>
> I don't find anything wrong with doing the changes after you find that
> the maintainer is not responsive. If the maintainer is responsive, he
> will a) do the changes b) give you the permission to do it c) give
> reasoning on why the proposed changes should not be done.

Why should someone have to go through all of that just to make these
minor fixes?  Is it really necessary for someone to be required to try
to track down and contact the maintainer to tell them that they put
"ebiuld" instead of "ebuild" into an ebuild?  This is my entire point.
Why are we forcing a process that only fosters inefficiency?  It is much
simpler to say "if you see one of these, fix it" than to force every
single action to go through the maintainer.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation