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On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 11:05 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote: |
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> Hello, |
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> |
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> The Undertakers team has frequently received various forms of |
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> 'criticism' of their effort in attempting to find and retire inactive |
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> developers. This is getting as far as to claim that we shouldn't retire |
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> anyone because there are no limits on commit slots. |
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> |
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So I think the problems are not about commit slots (I think that is a poor |
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way to think about it.) I think the problems we have seen are around |
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developers who lose interest in various areas of the tree. |
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- Herds / Projects that list N people, but really only have 1-2 active |
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developers. Sometimes the herd / project has no active developers. |
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- Metadata.xml that lists N people, but really only have 1-2 active |
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maintainers. Sometimes the package has no active developers. |
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The result of the above are essentially: |
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- Work on a given area of the tree has to wait some time while the |
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existing (inactive) maintainer is pinged. |
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- A given area of the tree may look well covered (e.g. package has many |
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maintainers listed) when in fact this is untrue and none of the maintainers |
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are active. This leads to developers possibly ignoring that portion of the |
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tree. |
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To me, retiring 'inactive' developers is really done to address these |
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issues. If inactive developers are removed from maintainer lists from time |
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to time, we get a better signal on what packages are actively maintained, |
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vs packages that need more support. |
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I don't have any particular problem with people who maintain only a few |
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packages; they may not commit often but as long as they care for the |
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packages assigned to them I think they still bring value. The trick is |
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differentiating between these people and inactive people. This is one |
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reason why we always email people; there is an expectation that active |
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developers respond to email and inactive developers do not. It seems to |
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have served us well thus far. |
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> |
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> Therefore, I would like to ask the wider community a general question: |
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> how do you feel about preserving commit access for people who no longer |
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> actively commit to Gentoo? I'm talking about extreme cases, say, |
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> no commits to any user-visible repository for over a year. |
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> |
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> -- |
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> Best regards, |
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> Michał Górny |
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> |
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