On Sep 13, 2005, at 6:10 PM, Philip Lamb wrote:
A quick question as to what the criteria are for giving a developer access to commit info files to the fink repository.
It's been kinda informal up to now, basically after you have a few packages under your belt some developer will take notice and ask fink- core to give you developer privileges. I'd say the usual number of packages it takes is 3 to 10.
I have several more that I use locally, and would add to fink except that I know that they will languish in the tracker, for want of someone to look at them.How many people on the fink project have access to move info files into the cvs repository? Judging by the number of packages in the tracker with group "undergoing validation" it seems that there are too few.
You can find the full list by checking the file CVSROOT/avail in Fink's CVS repository. It seems the current number is 62, which is quite a lot. However, with 2600 .info files in 10.4-transitional/ unstable, most of the more involved developers have dozens of packages to maintain, so it's hard for people to find time to look at submissions.
This clearly has caused much suckiness in the tracker. We're well aware of this, there's even a top-priority bug on the tracker devoted to dealing with it: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? func=detail&aid=1286402&group_id=17203&atid=117203
Some of the ideas we've had to speed things up are:- Automatic building/validation of packages, to automatically catch common problems. This would need some work on tools to perform the auto-building.
- Mentoring of new developers by existing devs, to focus efforts into getting submitters ready for full privileges. (Would you like to be the first to sign up? http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/ Fink:Mentoring )
- Allowing existing devs to give up their packages for adoption by new devs. This could give new devs a good starting point, and could lessen the workload on some of our more prolific devs.
There are some *draft* documents on the wiki that I encourage everyone to look at and critique: http://wiki.opendarwin.org/ index.php/Fink#The_new-maintainer_process
I'd like to hear any constructive comments about the process, so press the "reply" button or just drop by #fink.
Dave
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