nonresponsive maintainer policy

[James Findley]

On 07/30/2010 10:31 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:28:11 +0200
> Sven Lankes<sven at lank.es>  wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 03:28:42PM +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>>
>>>> I think we should add some policy to address those unmaintained
>>>> packages,
>>
>>> There is the non-responsive maintainer policy already.
>>
>> That policy isn't the easiest one to follow though. I understand that
>> taking someones packages away should never be easy but maybe we could
>> develop some metrics for the awolness of a maintainer and use that to
>> possibly speed up the process.
>
> I would love a better policy. It's hard to balance tho... between
> someone who is just busy and someone who is really missing. ;(
>
> I think one thing that would help is perhaps to form a group that looks
> for these people (possibly using what you are talking about below),
> tries to contact them and if that fails marks them as missing.
>>
>> I know that seth worked on something similar based on commit
>> frequency. What I could think of is:
>>
>>   * Look at the FAS activity
>>
>>     If a maintainer has multiple request for commit rights to his
>>     package which have not been answered in a long time that would
>>     increase his awolness counter.
>>
>>     (This would mean that we need to encourage people to actually deny
>>     requests that they don't want to approve - currently it seems to be
>>     accepted that denying a request is rude and the more polite way to
>>     not approve a commit request is to just ignore it).
>
> I'm not sure just not acting on a request there is a sign of awol.
> They could just be waiting for the person to prove themselves, or some
> other reason. But if there is no pkgdb activity at all, I think thats
> an indicator perhaps.
>
>>   * Check if he actually has a current certificate to interface with
>> koji
>
> Good idea.
>
>>   * Look at koji activity
>
> Yep.
>
>>     If a maintainer hasn't done any build in koji for three months or
>>     more that would increase his awolness counter.
>
> yeah, or any git commits, etc.
>

Remember that some packages get very little activity because they need 
very little.
Increasing someone's AWOLness counter because they didn't for example, 
update ed is just plain silly.  If a package is no longer under heavy 
development, and is in a stage where releases happen very rarely if 
ever, and bugfixes are similarly rare, then what do you expect people to 
do?  Reformat the spec file every three months so as to avoid the AWOL 
counter?

Unless there are open bugs against a package with no activity from a 
maintainer, or it's way behind upstream (in which case there should 
probably be a bug open), the fact that nothing has happened in koji for 
three months isn't a problem.

Lots of packages in Fedora are not bleeding edge GUI apps needing 
constant TLC.  Please remember this when creating policies.

-siXy