Make pkgdb grant co-maintainer status automatically? (was Re: Non-responsive maintainer fast track procedure for libsndfile)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:53:29 +0200, Kevin wrote:

> Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> 
> > If some provenpackager want's to maintain it, why don't they take
> > ownership?
> 
> Because I can fix the occasional broken dependency, [...]

... which hopefully will not be a problem anymore with a revised
push process. You could not limit your activity to Rawhide, and you would
not learn about broken deps and required rebuilds for released dists, if
you're not willing to become one of the package's maintainers.

> [...] but I can't commit to 
> actually maintain hundreds of packages. For example, the bugmail would flood 
> me, I couldn't fix any of those bugs anyway, only the complete showstoppers 
> (i.e. broken deps and MAYBE (!) FTBFS).

So, you won't forward problem reports to upstream either (as by now everyone
knows anyway that you'd like crash reports to flood upstream directly instead
of Fedora's tracker), you won't keep an eye on upstream development (e.g.
commit diffs and release monitoring), and you won't learn if your recent
rebuild or upgrade causes segfaults.

In other words, you request to become a package-monkey with no
responsibilities, who may play with a pile of packages, which is free for
everyone to either mess with or leave it aside.

This might work with some software, which is rather maintenance-free and
has upstream developers who make quality releases, but packages for such
software often are easy to maintain and are low-hanging fruit even for RPM
packging beginners. If the software is used at all by anyone within the
Fedora community, it should not be a big problem to find _at least_ one
packager for it. And if there are more than one, increase the freedom and
encourage even additional people to become one of the package's maintainers.