AWOL owners and stale packages.

Michael J. Knox michael at knox.net.nz
Fri May 12 02:48:47 UTC 2006


This is a request for comment and perhaps an informal proposal for how 
to handle packages with AWOL owners.

I have spent sometime discussing this process with a work college, a 
debian developer, on how best practice and the appropriate etiquette 
could be shown to the current owner of a said package. He suggested that 
debian's NMU or Non-Maintainer Upload, processed worked well within the 
debian development community.

I have read through this policy of debian's and think that it addresses 
the issues nicely of ensuring that packages are not left to become stale 
and not offend packager owners.

I am proposing we (Fedora Extras) adopt the same process. It would need 
to be made Fedora relevant and I would hope that people will see the 
plus in such a process.

The over all aim is to avoid "stale" packages in Extras, more swiftly 
pick up on unmaintained packages and hopefully encourage people to work 
on these packages by providing a process in which people can fix them.

An example would be:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2006-April/msg01763.html

This also allows people to demonstrate that they have a willingness to 
maintain a package and are capable of doing so.

You can review debian's process here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s-nmu

Some items that would need clarifying, would be the time needed to be 
considered "reasonable" in the time of contact and delay. Also, there 
would need to be persons responsible for "approving" the take over of a 
package.

Please note, this is not to address or replace the orphan process, but 
to help in cases where the package has not been orphaned and the 
maintainer is not contactable.

If a process like this is received well, then I am happy to draft it for 
FESCo to ponder.

Regards

Michael




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