On Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:13:11 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 07:52:19PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>
> Why? Grr! It does not take someone from FESCo to draft such a thing.
> Anyone, yes ANYONE, can draft something and ask FESCo to ratify it.
Indeed, but nobody has come with something now, so I think it would be
nice to have FESCo propose something.
> Now, frankly I'm not sure something outside of the existing AWOL
> procedure is needed at all.
I am sure of the contrary. AWOL is for people who are AWOL. Here we are
talking about maintainers who are not AWOL but still don't act. It is
a very different situation. If somebody AWOL has his packages forcefully
orphaned there is no problem (it is even right...), while for a maintainer
not AWOL, it may be considered to be rude.
Here the maintainer would end the AWOL procedure with a comment in
bugzilla, but afterwards might still not take proper action to fix the bug
(and apply a patch or version upgrade).
A different procedure is needed, in particular for the hard problems where
months pass by without progress. Somebody to rule how to proceed. Somebody
with the decision-power to open up the cvs acls for a package or to
over-rule the package owner if necessary. Else the package collection
cannot be called not community-driven in such areas.
> I agree. Open CVS ACLs and co-maintainers _should_ help lessen
the
> occurrence of this. However, that is still up to the primary maintainer
> to decide, and we have to take exceptions as they come.
No, open CVS ACLs and co-maintainers don't help in that case. Well, it
helps implementing the fix, but it isn't the issue here. Here we just
want that the maintainer says 'ok, you seem to be interested, be
co-maintainer, implement what you propose I'll check and rebuild'. Or
'Ok, propose a patch'. Or 'This seems to be an easy fix, but there are
some issues you are missing, still I don't have currently the time to
explain, I'll come back as time permit'.
The last excuse I find questionable. Lack of time is a primary reason to
search for co-maintainers. Else it becomes a hindrance. If specific issues
are known, they can be summed up (briefly!) to give the contributors and
potential co-maintainers some input to think about. Consider it
home-work. Such brief feedback need not be ultimately convincing and may
result in a series of comments over a longer period of time.
--
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