Collective maintenance
Patrice Dumas
pertusus at free.fr
Fri Jun 13 21:32:43 UTC 2008
On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 01:36:40AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram 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.
There is a policy, here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy/WhoIsAllowedToModifyWhichPackages
But it doesn't cover the case you are seing, this is the typical
'easyfix but maintainer is not responding'.
> I remember seeing similar discussions before so this isn't a
> isolated problem.
Indeed. I keep asking people to do some guidelines, I think that it is
unfortunate, but it happens too often in fedora. I have easyfix or bugs
where I propose to do the work that are opened for months if not more,
if I was a casual user, I would find this unacceptable.
> can just go ahead and fix the problem noting the details in the commit
> message instead of having to file a bug report?
I don't think this is right either. In my opinion cases where it is ok
to do something like that are rightly covered in the policy mentionned
above. I think that a specific policy is needed which would be more
similar with the missing in action policy, but for a particular easyfix
bug where somebody is ready to do the work, and not for a maintainer.
Some people proposed to escalate to FESCO such cases, but I think it is
much too common to use FESCo escalation for those cases.
--
Pat
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