Co-maintainersip policy for Fedora Packages

[Hans de Goede]

Hi all,

Just jumping into the discussion here, I haven't followed this from the 
start as I was busy with other stuff, so I just started reading the 
proposal on the wiki.

I have a couple of problems with the current text, which I will list 
most important ones first:

1)

"People owning a lot of packages are encouraged to hand over 
maintainership to other maintainers with less packages. That should 
share the load between different people and result in better overall 
package quality, as people that maintain only a small number of packages 
often take more care of them than those with a lot of packages."

<rant>

WHHAAAATTT??? This is absurd, so people with a lot of dedication to the 
project supposedly are doing a worse job then Johnny oneshot / twoshot?
(apologies to all those with only a few packages who do a good job!)

This is really absurd, according the the Status page I have 98 packages 
in FE, yet I have 0 open bugzilla tickets against any of my 98 packages, 
regularly help closing other peoples bugs, and have 0 cleanups needed on 
the Status page either.

I feel offended, really I do!

Please remove this text ASAP!

</rant>


2)

"all packages should have at least two co-maintainers"

Already discussed in this thread, but I think the text about this should 
be removed completely too. It will be nearly impossible to find 
co-maintainers for many of my packages. Quite a few of them I picked up 
because their original maintainers orphaned them for various reasons.

I fully welcome quality co-maintainers who volunteer, but I will spend 0 
time actively searching for co-maintainers.

3)

"The primary maintainer can set individual guidelines what his 
co-maintainers are allowed and what not; be has to put them into the 
wiki at Packages/<package-name>/MaintainerRules . A hint to that page 
should be as comment on the top of the spec file."

This belongs in the VCS or in the package database, why don't put 
owners.list on the wiki too?

My main interface when doing FE work is an xterm with a text-editor and
a browser window with bugzilla, thats 2 different interfaces already I 
don't want a third, thinking about this I believe that for the sake of 
keeping information together maybe other per package info should be in a 
textfile in the VCS-dir of the package too. Say an owners.txt file per 
package-dir˙

4)

All in all the whole proposol reads as a vision of how things should 
ideally be and not as a proposal for a policy at all, a policy states 
rules and procedures, this is not a policy, this is a piece of prosa, a 
view of how things should be. And at that I believe a view of how things 
should be according to a small group of people, not how things should be 
according to the larger community, but thats just my opinion. When 
looking at this as a policy, then the only real policy in there is:
a) "Coordination between maintainers"
b) "Disputes"
c) "Intermediate solution"

The rest is a vision statement, not a policy. Please put this in 2 
different documents.

Regards,

Hans