Collective maintenance

[Rahul Sundaram]

Jon Ciesla wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> A friend of mine pinged me and asked about the status of this bug
>>
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442921
>>
>> Just using this as an example here since it a simple one. This is
>> apparently just a simple missing dependency but hasn't been fixed in a
>> while. Just using this as a example, assuming that the maintainer is
>> busy, on vacation or something and cvsextras is open, many others could
>> fix this issue bypassing the primary maintainer for the moment but there
>> doesn't seem to be any policy on what kind of fixes can be collectively
>> done. I remember seeing similar discussions before so this isn't a
>> isolated problem. Do we need some guidelines on this so folks like
>> Michael Schwendt (again, just as an example specific to this bug report)
>> can just go ahead and fix the problem noting the details in the commit
>> message instead of having to file a bug report?
> 
> My left brain side says, maybe we need a policy.  My right brain side
> says, if the acl is open, and you can fix it, fix it.

The problem there is one of expectations. Some maintainers are 
completely ok with this. Personally, I don't have a problem with anyone 
fixing any bugs on the packages I maintain and would be thankful for 
that. Other maintainers want more "ownership" and would prefer to be 
personally notified or do the changes themselves. Technically, we are 
good to go in most cases since the ACL's are open for majority of the 
packages. Socially, we are not since there isn't any policy and people 
don't want to offend existing maintainers by bypassing them (with 
notable exceptions like the Red Hat desktop team). I would prefer a 
policy that blurred the line of ownership more to a culture of 
collective maintenance and sets the right expectations for everyone 
involved. Then we can follow that up by having bugzilla be aware of easy 
to fix bugs and people who are interested in doing simple fixes can do 
that when they find time in between sponsors, SIG's and so on.

Rahul