Proposal: unmaintained.release file in CVS

[Chris Weyl]

On 8/27/06, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
> One issue that has come up repeatedly is deciding when someone should
> step up to do work on a package in the absence of maintainer action.
> Some (perhaps most) maintainers don't want to maintain their packages
> for Fedora releases that have been passed to Legacy, yet the various
> people who may still be interested in these packages (especially the
> security team) have no way to know if the maintainer is still
> maintaining a release or not.
>
> So I propose that we indicate this in some manner.  In the absence of
> a package database which will of course give us that ability, I
> propose simply adding a file named "unmaintained.release" to CVS in
> the same manner as the "needs.rebuild" file.

I like this: it's simple, gets the point across, and is consistent
with other practices.  I also like the idea of automatically tagging
branches as unmaintained as core goes to legacy, which would make this
"just work".

One thought:  it'd probably be a good idea to track special/flag files
on the wiki somewhere.  So far, to my (quite possibly incomplete)
knowledge, there are:

dead.package
needs.rebuild

> Alternately, we can invert the expectations and require that packagers
> add a "maintained.release" file to CVS to indicate that old releases
> are still maintained.  I think that this is less optimal than
> specifically indicating that a release is unmaintained, but it has the
> property of releases automatically being unmaintained if there is no
> maintainer action which may better meet expectations.  We could also
> get this behavior by automatically adding the "unmaintained.release"
> file when a release goes to Legacy.

Not to add another flag, but while I'm thinking about it, perhaps we
should also allow for a "maintained.by" if that branch is maintained
by someone (or SIG) other than the person listed in owners.list.  This
could be in, e.g., "Name <email at foo.bar>" format for better automagic
parsing, even...

                      -Chris

-- 
Chris Weyl
Ex astris, scientia