On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Denis Dupeyron <calc...@gentoo.org> wrote: > But nobody owns anything in Gentoo. As a developer > you're not king of the hill but servant of the users. The only way to > make yourself more relevant is by doing a better job, not by barking > at the others to protect your territory.
I think that has to be qualified. If you're developing a package, and somebody else wants to add new functionality/features/etc, and is willing to put in the time to support them, then yes, it isn't your territory, and they can co-maintain. However, if somebody just commits something to your package, and it causes you headaches, and they aren't committing to long-term maintenance of the package, then yes, you can revert, etc. The bottom line is that package maintenance is a long-term commitment. You can't modify an ebuild and walk away, in general. Oh, sure, if you're just renaming a dependency or something there is room for exceptions. However, you don't change how a package works without cooperating with the maintainer, or becoming one yourself. The alternative is a Gentoo where packages that are working just fine get abandoned because somebody messes with them, and then the maintainer isn't allowed to maintain them the way they like and so they find something better to do with their time, leaving nobody maintaining the package. I don't know the specifics of this case so nobody should take this as finger-pointing unless it is your conscience doing the pointing. Maintainers don't "own" packages, but it is in everybody's interest to keep maintainers happy. Any dev can step up and co-maintain any package, but they have to be in it for the long term. If you don't like how somebody else is maintaining their package, and you're not willing to assume responsibility for it long term, then just consider yourself an end-user, and pretend you don't have commit rights. The only exceptions to this apply to projects like council, QA, etc, and those should represent even larger long-term commitments (and for the most part these bodies use more discretion anyway). Rich
