[ACTION REQUIRED] Retiring packages for F-17

[Kevin Kofler]

Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
> What I'm trying to say here is that there is a magic number ( it might
> be  8 it might be more but most likely it's less ) to how many packages
> single individual can properly and reliably maintain in the distribution.
> 
> The rules become somewhat different with regards to the number of
> components with "co-maintainership" but you still have only those
> gestimated 4 hours to spend ( in reality this probably is a lower number
> ).

First of all, if a package is maintained by 10 people, that divides the work 
by 10. If you don't take that into account, your proposal will actually 
discourage comaintainership instead of encouraging it, which is really the 
exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish!

Secondly, only 8 packages is a joke, we don't have remotely enough 
maintainers to be able to sustain such a low ratio of packages per 
maintainer.

And finally, I don't agree with the idea of a hard limit, because different 
people have different amounts of free time and work at different speeds, and 
because different packages require different amounts of care. As an example, 
look at z88dk:
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=z88dk.git
You'll see that I haven't touched this package since 2009. And that was NOT 
because of laziness, but because there was literally nothing to change! 
There hasn't been a single bug filed, nor has there been a new upstream 
release (which would have led to a bug being filed thanks to Upstream 
Release Monitoring, but I just double-checked), since 2009. (In fact, the 
only 3 bugs ever filed against z88dk were an ExcludeArch tracking bug 
because the code was not 64-bit safe, which I fixed in 2007, and Upstream 
Release Monitoring bugs for 1.8 in 2008 and 1.9 in 2009.) Effort to maintain 
this package: basically zero.

        Kevin Kofler