Re: [gentoo-dev] [GLEP] Re-Defining team and herd

[Fabian Groffen]

On 17-06-2008 09:54:46 +0200, Tiziano Müller wrote:
> From the GLEP:
> *snip*
> The biggest differences to the current system are:
> * A team is not implicitly defined as the people who maintain the packages
> in a certain herd
> * A herd is really only a logical unit of packages and may therefore _not_
> possess any ressources
> * A team may maintain more than one herd (respectively the packages within
> them)
> *snip*

While you're at redefining the terms `herd' and `team', I'd like your
GLEP to address the maintenance issue as well.  With teams being allowed
to maintain a package, and the team being ``a denoted group of people''
you block out potential maintenance from others.

With Gentoo being a project with some devs, of which many quite limited
involved, I argue productivity for some of our devs is limited by the
barrier of the ``maintainer''.

Recently I've noticed that maintainer-needed and maintainer-wanted
ebuilds are outlawed and hence can be maintained by anyone.  In
particular treecleaners seem to have started handling the trivial bugs
on those packages, which I consider a positive movement.  While
maintainer-needed and maintainer-wanted have a negative taste, I feel
they potentially aren't as negative as they sound.  I think there are
many more devs just wasting their time in IRC because none of ``their''
packages have ``solveable'' bugs.

Dropping explicit maintenance for packages that are not critical (which
are many IMO) would allow for a new ``team'' consisting of all of our
bored devs that feel like harvesting the low hanging fruit by doing
trivial version bumps, cleanups and trivial patches.

In other words, I would like your proposal to:
- make a difference between ``must be maintained'' packages (e.g.
  base-system) and the rest
- for the non-critical packages define a group of ``experts'' that does
  not exclude ``foreign'' maintenance -- what if a herd is understaffed?
- have a structure (e.g. time-out rule) that allows the ``experts'' to
  do full maintenance of their packages if they are active

Your GLEP as it is now doesn't have any added value to me, as it seems
only to change things into other terminology, more files, and cause an
avalanche of other GLEPs without a clear rationale.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level
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