Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Some ideas on how to reduce territoriality
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:11:38
Message-Id: 1186178767.8470.47.camel@inertia.twi-31o2.org
1 More and more, I am finding developers who are afraid to touch packages
2 for even minor things if they're not the maintainer. This is a sad
3 state of affairs and not the reason we have maintainers. We have
4 maintainers to assure that a package is being taken care of, not to
5 establish some kind of "territory" over that package. Because of this
6 misconception, I would like to come up with and document a listing of
7 things that any ebuild developer can feel free to do to any package
8 *without* maintainer consent. These are generally all minor things, but
9 things that I think are important. I'm going to list off the things
10 that I can think of, and encourage everyone else to speak up if I've
11 missed something.
12
13 - HOMEPAGE changes
14 - LICENSE changes
15 - arch-specific patches/dependencies - If someone is requesting KEYWORD
16 changes on a package and it requires a patch or additional dependencies
17 for your architecture, you are not only permitted, but really are
18 required to make the necessary changes to add support for your
19 architecture.
20 - Typo fixes
21 - SRC_URI changes - If the source has moved, feel free to fix it. We
22 shouldn't have to wait on the maintainer to fix something this simple.
23 - *DEPEND changes due to changes in your packages - If a package that
24 you maintain moves, splits, or otherwise changes in a manner that
25 requires dependency changes on any other packages in the tree, you
26 should make those changes yourself. You're free to ask for assistance,
27 of course, but you have the power to make the changes yourself without
28 asking permission. After all, you're the one "breaking" the package, so
29 you should be the one to "fix" it.
30 - Manifest/digest fixes
31 - metadata.xml changes
32
33 There's a couple more that I wouldn't mind seeing as things developers
34 can do without the maintainer, but I can see how these might be a bit
35 more controversial, so I'm asking for input.
36
37 - Version bumps where the only requirement is to "cp" the ebuild
38 - (for arch teams) Stabilization of new revisions of an already stable
39 package - An example of this would be being able to stabilize foo-1.0-r2
40 if foo-1.0 (or foo-1.0-r1) is already stable, but not if only foo-0.9 is
41 stable.
42
43 So, what do you guys think?
44
45 --
46 Chris Gianelloni
47 Release Engineering Strategic Lead
48 Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
49 Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
50 Gentoo Foundation

Attachments

File name MIME type
signature.asc application/pgp-signature

Replies