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

[Mart Raudsepp]

On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 19:24 +0100, Roy Bamford wrote:
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> On 2009.05.14 01:32, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> [snip]
>
> > Project maintainer-wanted
> > =========================
> >
> > Abstract:
> > There are currently quite some package requests (over 3000)
> > languishing
> > on bugzilla waiting for a developer or team to get interested and
> > package it in the official gentoo-x86 portage tree. However in quite
> > some cases that might not happen for quite a while even with very
> > popular packages desired by users. The purpose of the
> > maintainer-wanted
> > project is to get as many of such packages to the official tree as
> > possible as a stopgap solution.
> >
> [snip]
> >
> > Discuss! :)
> >
> > Mart Raudsepp
> > Gentoo Developer
> > Mail: leio@g.o
> > Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio
> >
>
> Mart,
>
> I'm against for many of the reasons AllanJB outlined. There is no point
> in adding more unmaintained packages to the tree. Over time, the
> average quality of the tree will suffer.

I have not proposed adding unmaintained packages to the tree. I have
proposed adding packages to the tree that are maintained. The
maintainer-wanted team maintains them actively until a specific team is
interested in taking over.
Based on other replies to the thread, it seems no-one believes that a
special team could add only so many packages that they are capable of
maintaining in good quality.
Also it has been brought up many times that if there is a popular
package not yet in the tree, there will be someone to add and maintain
it. But that doesn't seem to be the case when looking at existing
maintainer-wanted bugs. Also by having a team for this, the whole team
is accountable. If a maintainer-wanted ebuild is added by this team, it
is done as a team - if the person in the team most interested in it is
busy otherwise, the team will still take care of its bugs and quality
and bumps.

> We could use user contributed ebuilds attached to bugs as a way to
> bring Sunrise to the contributors attention just by posting a comment
> to the bug. If the contributor follows up, we get another user
> maintained ebuild in Sunrise, which is good, as the current developers
> don't have to do all the work. We already know some Sunrise
> contributors become developers so perhaps we can use this as a way to
> attract more contributors (both users and developers).

Meanwhile there is no-one to add packages that are wanted by many users
to the official tree. This project is meant as a remedy for that. The
proposal also lists various ways for actually finding out what packages
are the ones most beneficial to have in the official tree - as opposed
to unknown quality attachment in bugzilla, sunrise overlay, other
overlays or requests in bug entries without an attached ebuild - as to
be able to inflict as much good for the distribution as possible, given
the teams current capacity.


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