Team Effort (was: Re: Dear Fesco: Orphan package process needs work)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

David Woodhouse schrieb:
> On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 16:06 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
>> We had people ready to step up beforehand.  I had volunteered, and 
>> perhaps others.  But david said he had it, so it was left alone.
>> There was fair warning, but nothing anyone can do if the owner is 
>> holding a package hostage.  David, the owner, said he would do it, and 
>> didn't.  And then it was dropped.  That's broken.
> 
> The reason this doesn't happen in Core is because we tend not to be so
> possessive about our packages. With a few highly-strung exceptions, you
> can generally just commit sensible fixes to any package which needs them
> and the maintainer will be happy that you helped them out. It's a _team_
> effort. 
> 
> Extras seems to lack that ethos, and people get massively proprietorial
> about their packages. And _that_, I think, is the root of the problem
> here.

This is part of the problem, not the root of it IMHO. I agree that we
need to change this in Extras to make it more a team effort. That was
discussed already in FESCo, but other things took more attention for
now. But it's still on my Todo-List

But the root of the problem in this case is FESCo-made. We didn't want
people to fix other peoples packages because one of the major goals of
the m{ae}ss-rebuild was: Make sure all maintainers are still around,
know their packages, khow to commit changes to CVS and all that stuff.

That's needed (until we have something better) in Extras because people
simply vanish often without telling us. That something that normally
does not happen in Core.

CU
thl