AWOL vs. adding comaintainer (Was: Re: A new version of gnome-applet-sensors)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 29 May 2007 21:19:32 +0200, Marcin Zajączkowski wrote:

> On 2007-05-29 20:54:50 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Tue, 29 May 2007 20:36:04 +0200, Marcin Zajączkowski wrote:
> > 
> >> On 2007-05-28 9:51:18 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> >> (...)
> >>> Either way I volunteer myself as co-maintainer for gnome-applet-sensors,
> >>> because of my involvednes in lmsensors upstream.
> >> Great! Even though we are still waiting for Aaron Kurtz reply I think
> >> that having comaintainer will be good for g-a-s anyway, especially that
> >> F7 (and updates for it) will be available for thousands of Fedora users
> >> very soon.
> >> In my opinion you could start procedure of comaintainer addition [1] and
> >> update a package (also for FC-5 and FC-6 branches).
> >>
> >> [1] - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/CVSAdminProcedure
> > 
> > Rather start the AWOL procedure first.
> 
> I thought about AWOL, but it takes more time. Adding comaintainer could
> be faster, but I don't know if it's required permission for current
> maintainer to become a comaintainer?

The people who process the change requests for owners.list need to check
that there is no hostile take-over.
 
> 2. Could be already mentioned bug [2] considered as a "asking for the
> maintainer to respond"?

It could be taken into account as a tiny amount [i.e. maybe a few days off
the waiting periods during the AWOL procedure], but it cannot be used to
skip the entire procedure IMO. While it is not nice of the package owner
to not respond in bugzilla for over a month, it is too easy to not pay
attention to bugzilla tickets, where somebody requests a version
upgrade. I recommend that the AWOL procedure is started with explicit
words and that the importance of a version upgrade is emphasised also in a
private mail.

> 3. Has to be whole procedure carried by a person who want to take the
> package over or (s)he has to only post a formal request to the
> maintainers list?

*Somebody* needs to track all contact attempts, and even if there is nobody
to take over a package immediately, the community would at least find out
that something is orphaned.

> 
> [2] - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=235655
>