Fedora clean up process seems to be seriously broken...

[Kevin Kofler]

Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
> Instead of everybody that are doing needed work in the distribution
> having to run around after maintainers trying to find out if they are
> still active or not and initiate the unresponsive maintainer policy,
> cant we revert the process and have maintainer(s) having to reassure
> their ownership on their package(s) at the begin of each development
> cycle and if they dont do that before x time, the package(s) they
> maintain will be automatically orphaned and given up for someone else to
> grab and take ownership before x time runs out and if nobody does they
> get remove from the distribution?

That is only going to annoy existing active contributors, who have really 
other things to do than to go clicking on a button for every package every 6 
months!

It's bad enough that we had that FPCA to agree on (in a big hurry, after the 
old ICLA had served us well for years) and now the password and SSH key to 
change (for no reason). Hassling us with even more "hey, I'm still there" 
buttons to click on won't help at all.

> I cant image how much resources across the project have been spent on
> packages that no longer are being actively maintained but have not been
> removed from the distribution.

I think actually not that much. And for a user, it's usually better to have 
a package available, even if it's poorly maintained, than to not have it at 
all! Removing a package also leads to upgrade path issues such as broken 
dependencies in the dropped package when the user upgrades to a newer 
Fedora. This really should only be an absolute last resort if the package 
cannot be made to work at all.

        Kevin Kofler