RFC: Fedora Extras EOL Policy

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:05:28 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:

> The users
> should trust the packager (and the fedora extras community) for doing the 
> right kind of maintainance.

Trust will become mistrust with every bugzilla ticket where a package
maintainer doesn't respond, with every security vulnerability which a user
believes is not fixed soon enough, with every package version that is seen
as too old compared with upstream releases, with every package that is
assigned to extras-orphan in bugzilla, [...]

It is admirable if we _hope_ for everything to work flawlessly. It is 
[an old] vision that every package (well, at least every popular one) is
taken care of by multiple maintainers, who not only add redundancy but
team-work, which is necessary in times of vacation and increased
resource/time/maintenance requirements.

We already face "fire'n'forget packages", which somebody manages to push
through the review process and into the repository, but who then hides
until it is discovered that the packages have not been touched for months
and that their maintainer doesn't seem to be reachable.

We need policies which document our goals and our procedures. To create an
environment which makes it easier and more convenient for contributors to
help where help is [or seems to be] needed. To avoid that the road of
"contact the maintainer" becomes a dead end with a sign which reads "so
the maintainer doesn't respond -- what now?". To document what we try to
achieve. Policies and procedures which make it possible to verify and
measure whether we do achieve what we try to achieve.