Re: [gentoo-dev] <non-maintainer-commits-welcome/> proposal

[David Seifert]

On Mon, 2022-07-04 at 16:19 +0200, Florian Schmaus wrote:
> I'd like to propose a new metadata XML element for packages:
>
>      <non-maintainer-commits-welcome/>
>
> Maintainers can signal to other developers (and of course contributors
> in general) that they are happy with others to make changes to the
> ebuilds without prior consultation of the maintainer.
>
> Of course, this is not a free ticket to always make changes to
> packages
> that you do not maintain without prior consultation of the maintainer.
> I
> would expect people to use their common sense to decide if a change
> may
> require maintainer attention or not. In general, it is always a good
> idea to communicate changes in every case.
>
> The absence of the flag does not automatically allow the conclusion
> that
> the maintainer is opposed to non-maintainer commits. It just means
> that
> the maintainer's stance is not known. I do not believe that we need a
> <non-maintainer-commits-disallowed/> flag, but if the need arises, we
> could always consider adding one. Although, in my experience, people
> mostly like to communicate the "non-maintainer commits welcome" policy
> with others.
>
> WDYT?
>
> - Flow
>

Ultimately, all these things really matter when only the defaults
change. Turn-right-on-red in the US is such a thing, because unless
otherwise stated, it's the norm. Knowing our devbase, with roughly 75%
mostly AWOL and barely reading the MLs, I don't think this idea will
bring about the desired change. Instead, we should really just go for
the <non-maintainer-commits-disallowed/> tag, because my feeling is that
the default will be that most maintainers don't mind non-maintainer
commits, except a select few territorial ones.

David