Co-maintainers to assist upstreams with their packages in Extras

[Jima]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> On 10/17/06, Kevin Fenzi <kevin-fedora-extras at scrye.com> wrote:
>> There are a number of people on the list that have submitted a single
>> package, and have had no activity adding to other reviews. Some of
>> them are upstream for the package they have submitted. From just one
>> package and no other activity it's very hard to decide to sponsor
>> these people, as they may well be 'fire and forget' type submitters.
>
> Despite of this, I think there is some added value in an upstream
> maintaner willing to work also on the packaging side. We should find a
> way to make sure we don't waste this value.
>
> So, it seems to me there are 2 kind of upstream maintainers:
> 1. those willing to be also Fedora packagers (also for their deps or
> other stuff)
> 2. those just interested in getting their package in extras
>
> The former is already covered by the current procedure (submit / find
> a sponsor / become contributor)
>
> For the latter, we could maintain a list (along the lines of the
> WishList page) where interested upstreams can add their project and
> look for a maintainer.

  +1, I agree with this approach.  I strongly suspect Patrice was thinking 
more of the latter and probably not at all about the former type (of which 
there are clearly a few).

> Once a maintaner is found and the package imported, they could be
> listed as co-maintaner for the project BUT only if we can put in place
> a restriction to where they could commit (e.g: only whre they are
> listed as co-maintaners).
> This should not be so hard with CVS (cvs_acls) or any other SCM we may
> use in the future.

  This doesn't seem like a bad idea, but I'm not totally convinced that 
upstream needs CVS access in all cases.  That still requires them to not 
make any changes to the package that would go against the Packaging 
Guidelines (etc), and therefore they'd need to keep track of what's in 
those guidelines.  I can certainly understand why they might not be 
totally up to speed on that, if their only goal is to have their package 
in Extras.  I don't think I'd care to memorize every distro's policies 
just to have my package included (and not piss them off). :-)
  That aside, I fully support the idea of upstream having open 
communication with a single (or specific group of) contributor.  I'm just 
not so sure all of them should be making changes directly.

      Jima