Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Project proposal -- maintainer-wanted

[Mart Raudsepp]

On Fri, 2009-05-15 at 06:25 -0400, Richard Freeman wrote:
> > if you want to exaggerate a bit, we have roughly 500 ebuilds in
> portage
> > which are maintainer-needed and have only a few users and thats why
> you
> > want to keep popular packages out of the tree?
> >
>
> Actually, where any of those ebuilds cause problems I'm fine with
> getting rid of them.  I'm certainly not arguing for inconsistency.
> I'm
> just suggesting that we shouldn't make the problem worse.

I'm not suggesting to make the problem worse either. On the contrary.
maintainer-needed packages that clearly are used to close by no-one or
no-one (based on no-one reporting build bugs or version bump requests or
whatever) should probably indeed be last-rited and removed from the
tree, especially if there is no active upstream.
This seems to be what the treecleaners project is about, and
maintainer-wanted is not meant to have anything to do with that. It is
about getting popular packages (based on various metrics) into the
official tree for easy access and with known quality.

>
> If a package is popular then somebody should volunteer to maintain it
> (whether by becoming a gentoo dev or by starting their own overlay).
> If
> that isn't happening than clearly the package isn't THAT important.
> This is open source - if you have an itch, then scratch it!  Don't
> just
> complain that nobody else is scratching YOUR itch (even if it is a
> popular itch).

I don't think we have all topics covered by active teams. When
maintainer-wanted team packages something in-tree that would be suitable
for a certain existing team, the categorization in the proposed listing
of maintainer-wanted packages would imply that, so that once they are
able to handle more they can take over if it is well suited for their
set of packages.
Until such a time this kind of packages would be available in great,
good or acceptable quality to the users.
>
> In any case, my opinion is that for packages to be in portage they
> should be of a certain level of quality, and a developer should be
> accountable for the packages they commit.  Anybody is welcome to grab
> ebuilds out of CVS, screen them, and commit them.  However, if they
> cause havoc then the developer can't just say "but it was popular and
> unmaintained, so I figured I'd just commit something without looking
> at
> it."  If a developer is willing to commit an appropriate amount of
> time
> to QA then they essentially have become a maintainer and the package
> is
> no-longer maintainer-wanted.

The maintainer-wanted team would effectively aggregate those people
together, so that the end result would be better quality, quicker
response times and so on.


-- 
Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio@g.o
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio