On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 06:43:03PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Don Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On Wed, 28 Mar 2007, Charles Plessy wrote: > > >> The maintainer is not MIA, but does not actively develop anymore. > > > Packages like this should have a message to the current maintainer with > > a proposal to co-maintain or orphan+adopt followed by an ITH (intent to > > hijack) if there is no response within a reasonable period of time.[1] > > > If no one is interested in stepping forward to do this and deal with the > > package, then the status quo is the best that can be done. While it is > > suboptimal, it's the best we can do until someone wants to take over. > > So, here's a possibly weird proposal. > > What if we had some mechanism whereby people could indicate interest in > maintaining a package should anything happen to the current maintainer? > Have it be as non-confrontational as possible by having it not indicate > any feeling about whether the package is currently maintained well, just a > willingness to help should the current maintainer be unable to continue > for some reason. > > Then, should the package run into any trouble, we'd know whether anyone > else is actually already in a position to potentially take it over, or > whether there really isn't anyone who feels like they could do so. > > Problems that I see with this right away are: > > * The data could easily get stale. I may be willing to help with a > package right now, but a year from now when it has problems, I may no > longer be in that position. I'm not sure if some sort of periodic ping > of "you said you'd be willing to take on all of these; reply if that's > not still true" would cut it. > > * My guess is that if we put this system in place, we'll immediately > discover that most of our core packages have no backup ready and > available. But that may be useful information anyway. > > For example, I (and probably various other people) would register my > willingness to take over autoconf should Ben ever no longer be in a > position to maintain it. That doesn't mean that he's doing a bad job > (he's doing a *great* job so far as I can tell); it's just a note that > should anything catastrophic happen to him, people don't have to scramble > to look for a replacement maintainer for that package. > I think I recall making a similar suggestion at somepoint. It was a 'list of people interested in this package'. People would add their name to a page associated with the package and if $SOMETHING happened, then the current maintainer could have a list of folks who could take over. But with your idea, I'd also see it as a place where the current maintainer could ask for help. Pehaps, based upon some condition, like too many NMU's, or unreply-to-bugs, this list could be used to change the status of the package-maintainer pair from active to inactive and then the people on this list could be automatically queried via email script for possible co-maintainership or take-over if the mainaitner does not respond to the co-maint/help request or seems to be mia. -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux == | my web site: | | : :' : The Universal |mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/| | `. `' Operating System | go to counter.li.org and | | `- http://www.debian.org/ | be counted! #238656 | | my keyserver: subkeys.pgp.net | my NPO: cfsg.org | |join the new debian-community.org to help Debian! |
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