nonresponsive maintainer policy (was: Re: Can anyone contact Balint Christian (rezso)?)

[Sven Lankes]

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 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).

 * Check if he actually has a current certificate to interface with koji

 * Look at koji activity

   If a maintainer hasn't done any build in koji for three months or
   more that would increase his awolness counter.

The awolness-counter would only be looked at when someone thinks about
starting the awol procedure and it could be used to speed up the process
- maybe get an non-responsive Maintainer procedure done in one week
instead of four or five.

I know that there is the "Fast Track procedure" but that is for when "it
may be needed to reassign a package quickly". When I was bit by gdal
being in FTBFS for too long (and with it merkaartor which I maintain) I
commented on the bugs and waited a while. When that didn't do anything I
email Christian and also started work on a fixed package which rsc then
built for rawhide using his provenpackager powers.

I could have stopped there (and I nearly had done that) without starting
the policy procedure - just because the process requires the one
interested in getting things fix to do five or six things each a week
apart. And looking at the number of "awaitaing review" maintainers there
have been a few people before me who wanted to help get things fixed ...

> It can't be repeated often enough: We need maintainers for each and every
> package in the collection. To have packages and bug reports assigned to an
> inactive person A with provenpackager B doing random upgrades from time to
> time is a broken system. B ought to become the maintainer instead. And C
> and D and E in the community also ought to consider joining the package's
> team of maintainers, too.

I agree. But we also need to make it easier for people to do so - if
you look at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/gdal (which
is one of rezsos packages), it has 6 users with "Awaiting Review" on
commit rights. It's not that people don't want to help out but we're
making it too hard for them to do so.

-- 
sven === jabber/xmpp: sven at lankes.net