Sponsor responsibilities (was: Re: F7 Release Discussion)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:50:15 -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

> Perhaps I am not being clear on what I am proposing. 
> Of course a sponsor shouldn't be required to start maintaining all the
> leaving maintainers packages. There's no way that would work. 

Right.

> What I am saying is that they should be able to drive forward the
> AWOLmaintainer process for those packages, and do things like posting
> emails to the list saying "I sponsored maintainer foo, who is no longer
> around, the following packages are orphaned, does anyone want to take
> over them?". 
> 
> Is that more clear?

This is similar but not equal to

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Policy/AWOL_Maintainers

which involves FESCo in the process.

It highly depends on the new FAS and PackageDB and any additional tools
based on it.

If a contributor is AWOL or has left the project, the sponsor may choose
to withdraw the sponsorship at some point.

The corresponding data changes in the FAS could propagate into the
PackageDB, and a list of new orphans would be created and announced.
Co-maintainers and people in Cc might receive a notification, too. Open
tickets in bugzilla might be reassigned semi-automatically, too.

More interesting are answers to the key questions:

 - what happens with built and released packages when the package
   becomes orphaned?

 - whether and when to delete orphaned rpms in the repository?

This is not something the sponsor may decide alone. It needs policies, so
the sponsors know exactly how to proceed. In general, I'm more interested
in how-tos than in questions. Finding new maintainers for orphans can be
tiresome and unsuccessful. Having to clean up the mess without clear
policies can be burdensome.

> Thanks for all your hard work on those scripts. :) 

upgradecheck.py is not mine, though.