On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 4:39 AM, Markos Chandras <hwoar...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 12/23/2012 02:06 AM, Doug Goldstein wrote: >> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Markos Chandras >> <hwoar...@gentoo.org> wrote: >>> >>> >> >> I see "free" as "dump a lot of orthogonally related packages on to >> the herd that is listed but really the other herd members aren't >> interested in those packages. > > Then that herd should not be on metadata.xml. What's the point of > being there if they have absolutely no idea how to maintain the package...
Agreed - I suspect that many herds reflect how packages were maintained 5 years ago, and not how they are maintained today. If a herd isn't associated with an active project, it should probably be dropped. > *Sigh*. We don't retire people who actively commit. If that person was > not capable of maintain this package (say if that package has 20 open > bugs for months) then we need to remove him from metadata.xml and say > "sorry folks nobody maintains it" Depends on the bug. :) At work most of the systems I work on have had hundreds of open bugs for years. A failure to close a bug is not a failure to maintain. In any case, nobody should be forcibly retired if they're interested in sticking around. However, the fact is that if you guys are sending out emails and getting no replies for weeks on end, what else can you do? > >> If you need a concrete example of a package, that would be MythTV. >> I've been hoping for the day that someone becomes a Gentoo >> developer with the goal of maintaining MythTV for nearly a decade >> but it hasn't happened. > Did you explicitly drop it to maintainer-needed@ so others can know > nobody maintains it? Or do you expect them to guess it by leaving bugs > open on purpose? Telling people on bugzilla that they are welcome to > maintain it is only part of a solution. Did you announce it on a > mailing list? Maybe gentoo-users@ Hmm, mythtv is part of its own herd, so I never bothered to add myself to the metadata.xml. Maybe I should do that. :) I don't have any plans to go anywhere - in fact I just stuck a new set of 0.26 fixes in my overlay for testing (rich0 in layman) and was planning on moving them into the tree in a week or so. > Like I said we are working on a "less brain-dead" policy so I have > nothing else to contribute to this thread Feel free to solicit feedback on such policy from the dev community at large. This is obviously something of general interest. That isn't to say that you can't brainstorm things internally and formulate your thoughts as well. Rich
