On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 03:46:05PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > 3. Abolish maintainership entirely.
This is the obviously right solution.
Everything else would be a temporary work-around to inefficiencies and
bugs introduced by the existence of explicit maintainership.
With explicit maintainership Debian is ignoring well-known software
engineering best practices, and most notably the fact that "strong code
ownership" is bad and invariably gets in the way of effective
collaborative development.
We should go for "weak code ownership" instead, which *in theory* is
what we already have (given every DD can NMU any package), but the
*culture* of strong ownership is so rooted in the project that people
are still too afraid of using it. Also, we don't have good tools[^] that
make it trivial to integrate back changes that have been NMUed by
others; again, getting in the way of efficient collaboration.
I'm personally convinced that a strong, symbolic act is needed to
actually make weak code ownership a reality in Debian. Abolishing the
Maintainer field all together[*] might be it.
Revolutionary yours,
Cheers.
[^] well, we have dgit, but AFAICT is not really popular yet
[*] together with making sure that any DD can commit to any public repo
on alioth
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . z...@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o .
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