nonresponsive maintainer policy

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:31:22 +0100, James wrote:

> Remember that some packages get very little activity because they need 
> very little.

And these are not a problem at all.

> Increasing someone's AWOLness counter because they didn't for example, 
> update ed is just plain silly.

[snipped the rest here]

Uh, come on, ... that's not helpful. There are ideas how to detect absent
maintainers early by collecting and *combining* information available in
the Fedora intrastructure. Not by having a single old stable pkg trigger
an AWOL alarm.

So far: A package can have dozens of unresponded tickets in bugzilla (with
perhaps all of them not having been looked at), a new upstream release
made a year ago, a maintainer who has dropped of Fedora and hasn't
renewed certs for half a year, ... and nobody would notice. Provenpackagers
would apply hot-fixes in Rawhide for FTBFS issues.

Once somebody discovers that the package is an orphan, starting the
non-responsive maintainer procedure wouldn't be much of a big deal.
What's 3-4 weeks compared with N months? Though, repeatedly the packagers
(sometimes new ones who would join Fedora for a single pkg), who would
like to take over an orphan, have pointed out that they consider the
procedure tedious and a pain (and I understand that failed attempts at
contacting a person is no fun). Especially if a pkg has been in a poor
state for N months anyway even in the stable dist releases.