concept of package "ownership"

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-07-05 at 13:30 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> In practice, packages still have maintainers who are recognized for
> practical reasons and generally you would check with the listed
> maintainer of a package before making a change to it. (But, hey, if they
> don't reply in a day or two, it's fair game!)
> 
> This generally works out pretty well, and helps out with the problem of
> having quite a small set of maintainers for an extremely large set of
> packages. I was often in the situation where I happened to notice a
> small issue with 'someone else's' package and could just go ahead and
> fix it, instead of having to go through the bureaucracy of filing a bug
> report and waiting for them to do it. 

I should add that obviously it works best if you exercise common sense
about what to change. I'd never go into someone else's package and
change their whitespace preferences or variable naming scheme or
whatever to match my own preferences just so I'd have an easier time
looking at their .spec file. Obviously it works best if you follow a
minimal approach of changing just what's necessary to address the
practical issue you're fixing.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net