Script to determinate packages wich need comaintainership

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 6/18/07, Todd Zullinger <tmz at pobox.com> wrote:
> As far as the greater goal of bringing more developers into Fedora,
> it's not so direct an approach.  But I think that it makes Fedora look
> good when we have the latest upstream offerings and are active
> upstream.  If one of the upstream folks gets tired of their particular
> distro shipping outdated versions of their software, they'll know they
> can use Fedora and stay current.  Then perhaps they'll also consider
> joining as a maintainer.

Join Fedora how? By submitting new packages they aren't already
involved in the upstream development of so they can earn sponsorship
status?  That's crap, and it arbitrarily raises the bar for developers
to be involved.

Look I'm not saying that maintainers shouldn't be involved in
upstream. But the reality is we simply do not have an established
mechanism to turn upstream developers into maintainers for existing
packages..and we really sort of need it.. if we want sustainable long
term package maintainence across the repository.

Here's the question that I need answering.

What is the process by which upstream developers can take some to all
of the maintainership duties of currently existing packages?   The
fedora sponsorship process is driven around the concept of package
submission... but how do we get people sponsored for maintainership
for packages that already exist?

We need a transitional process by which to bring developers into the
package maintainership process for software that already exists.
Currently, sponsorship involves a review of 'right action', and I want
to help interested developers gain enough access to the packaging
infrastructure for their software to build up the track record of
'right action' so when and if they want sponsored contributor
status... it won't sit stalled for weeks because they haven't
submitted a package or haven't chimed in on pending reviews.

-jef