Re: [gentoo-dev] proxy-dev (an alternative to sunrise?)

[Luis Francisco Araujo]

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Thomas Cort wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:19:14 -0400
> Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@g.o> wrote:
>
>> The users explicitly compromise to (just to make it clear): [1,2,3,4]
>
> People who participate in open projects like Gentoo come and go. What
> happens if/when the proxy maintainer decides to leave? Who will take
> care of the package? Maybe the mailing list could also be used to find
> users to proxy maintain abandoned packages?
>
Good point.

Definitely, the mailing list could be used to address this case too.

I see two possible situations in the best case:

1 - The developer sends the request to the mailing list asking for
somebody interested to continue proxy-maintaining the packages. Any
interested developer could step in.

2 - The proxy-user *could* be interested to become official developer to
maintain this package too.

As long as there exist an interested user to maintain the package i
think it's a matter of time to find a proxy-developer. (Any mechanism to
inform us which packages are in this state would be useful too, probably
a monthly message to the list?)

Now if the user isn't interested anymore , and i think this would be the
'worst' of the case, could be addressed in the following manner:

1- He could notify to the mailing list for any user interested to
continue maintaining the package(s).

2- If no user steps in, the developer would still represent officially
the package inside the tree. Now, this package _ideally_ shouldn't have
any bug (the user should have taken care of all of them right?), so
practically, this package shouldn't be any serious menace to the tree,
and therefore, the developer doesn't need to update the package if he
doesn't want to. If a bug appears , the developer can: a) Fix it , b)
mask the package , c) After b, remove the package. This being the
*worse* of the case as i said.

Now, i also see an interesting problem here.

I can notice we (as developers) make sort of an agreement when we become
a developer, but not when we leave the project. This is the main cause
we keep having so many packages unmaintained. I think that whatever we
do, if we don't find a solution to this situation, gentoo will continue
to suffer of this problem. And this idea is just an attempt to alleviate
some of it.

>> I know there already exist some developers working as proxy, well, i
>> appreciate if they got any comment or observation about this idea. This
>> is just a way of giving some organization to this kind of cooperative
>> mechanism at some degree. And an 'official' representation inside Gentoo
>> if we agree with it.
>
> I work with a user (Kai Huuhko) to maintain media-sound/quodlibet,
> media-libs/mutagen, and media-plugins/quodlibet-*. I have a dev overlay
> on overlays.gentoo.org where Kai and I both have commit access. We both
> work on the ebuilds in the overylay and exchange ideas over e-mail.
> After the ebuilds are complete and tested, I commit them to the official
> tree. Kia helps with bugs too. So far it has worked very well for us
> and we haven't had any problems with the arrangement. Having a helper
> saves me time and energy, which allows me do other Gentoo related tasks.
>
> -Thomas

Nice, we have something similar inside the Haskell herd. It looks like
we are not the only ones doing good then.

Probably making this mechanism more 'organized' and 'official', would
encourage more developers to work with it.

- --


Luis F. Araujo "araujo at gentoo.org"
Gentoo Linux
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