Re: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] call for agenda items for 2020-01-12 council meeting

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2020 at 03:55:22PM +0100, Piotr Karbowski wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 30/12/2019 00.30, William Hubbs wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > the Gentoo Council will meet on 2020-01-12 at 19:00 utc in the
> > #gentoo-council channel on freenode.
> >
> > Please reply to this message with any items you would like us to add
> > to the agenda.
>
> I'd like to request Council to define rules regarding maintainership
> boundaries and provide guidance regarding under what conditions one is
> allowed to make changes to packages that are by metadata.xml maintained
> by another party.
>
> The current situation is land of undefined rules and double standards
> under disguise of 'common sense'. Although it does work for most part,
> it's not uncommon to come across people that are overly territorial,
> treating Gentoo packages as their own personal property, who openly
> prohibit others from joining them as maintainers on packages, with the
> solo reasoning that they feel territorial and do not want others
> touching it.
>
> This leads to a situations, where some bugs reported on bugzilla are not
> fixed in timely fashion, even when there are other developers that are
> willing to fix those bugs and deal with whatever aftermath of doing
> those changes would bring.
>
> Because those rules are unsanctioned, we have land of middle
> inconvenience where one can never be sure if by declaring maintainer
> fimeout and fixing a bug would not bring ComRel on him, for touching the
> package one does not maintain. By defining rules and guidelines, it
> would greatly benefit Gentoo as a whole as well as reduce the
> frustration that come from dealing with people who are gate keeping
> while being unable to provide a valid reason why they do not want anyone
> toucing their property.

The maintainership policy is here.

https://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/package-maintainers/index.html

By default you aren't supposed to touch packages you don't maintain
without the maintainer approving your changes unless the changes are
trivial.

If you open a bug or contact a maintainer and they don't respond to your
request in 2-4 weeks, you can use maintainer-timeout to make the change.

I think this is fine at the distro level.

The uncertainty around this is that some maintainers give devs
permission to change any or some of their packages without contacting
them as long as they clean up any breakages they cause, and we don't
have a way of knowing who those maintainers are.  There was a proposal a
while back for a tag that would go in metadata.xml for a package that
would specify one of three levels of non-maintainer permission for a
package, but it seems to have died. I do think we should bring it back.

William