Maintainer Responsibility Policy

[Brian Pepple]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 20:10 -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Mon, 05 May 2008 21:01:35 -0400
> bpepple at fedoraproject.org (Brian Pepple) wrote:
> >                 
> > === Deal with reported bugs in a timely manner ====
> >       * 'Nuff said.
> 
> "If you find yourself unable to handle the load of bugs from your
> package(s), please ask for assistance on the fedora-devel and/or
> fedora-test lists. Teaching triagers about how to triage your bugs or
> getting help from other maintainers can not only reduce your load, but
> improve Fedora. Consider reaching out for some (more) co-maintainers
> to assist as well". 

Added.

> > === Maintain stability for users ===
> >       * Package maintainers should limit updates within a single
> > Fedora release to those which do not require special user action. Many
> >         users update automatically, and if their applications stop
> >         working from no action of their own then they will be upset.
> >         This goes doubly for services which may break overnight. 
> 
> I would add additionally: 
> 
> "Maintainers should not push every single upstream update to all
> branches. Examine the changes in each upstream release and ask if the
> update is worth download and update time for many users. For upstreams
> that update very often with many small updates, consider waiting and
> updated only when the amount of changes is worth updating. 

Added.

> > === Track dependency issues in a timely manner ===
> >       * In the development tree, and to a small degree in the release
> >         trees as well, updates to packages may cause other packages to
> >         have broken dependencies. Maintainers will be alerted when
> > this happens, and should work to rebuild their packages with all due
> >         haste. Broken dependencies may leave end user systems in a
> > state where no updates will be applied. In order to keep the
> >         distribution in a reasonable state, someone will step in and
> >         rebuild packages that have had dependency issues for some
> > time, but package maintainers should not rely on these rebuilds. 
> 
> Bodhi should prevent this in released branches now... so might need a
> bit of re-wording. 

Good suggestion.  I changed that to refer to Rawhide only, since that
should be the only branch affected.

Thanks, Kevin!

Later,
/B
-- 
Brian Pepple <bpepple at fedoraproject.org>

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BrianPepple
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 810CC15E
BD5E 6F9E 8688 E668 8F5B  CBDE 326A E936 810C C15E
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20080505/4c9da08c/attachment.sig>