On Mar 19, 2006, at 5:10 PM, Trevor Harmon wrote:
And though I understand that you feel snubbed at having your package "taken out of your hands," I feel that packages *should* be able to be taken out of a maintainer's hands, as long as responsibility for the changes are also taken out of the maintainer's hands.
And:
And as you said in your response to Max, sometimes changes are so trivial that there's no need to defer to the original maintainer. It would be nice to have a sort of wiki-like model for editing package descriptions.
Interesting thoughts, thanks for posting them :-)However, I must disagree about how wonderful collaborative packaging could be. Once upon a time, somebody had the great idea that rather than individual maintainers for each of the Gnome packages, Fink should have a Gnome Team which worked together. As we're all aware, this didn't work out too well! While a few people would make changes to each package, it was too hard to decide things by consensus. Packages would fork when different maintainers had different ideas, nobody was really sure when things were ready for release, coordination was nearly impossible with the variance of time zones and schedules.
Now this doesn't mean it's impossible to collaborate successfully, but it's tough. The system we have now means there's always some single individual who is responsible, and that's a big bonus. I imagine that's why Debian also uses this system.
However... it's clear there are some issues that come up every so often! Trevor, why don't you document things a bit on the wiki? We could definitely start formalising the process of package abandonment/ take-over-ment, what small changes are considered ok without asking first, etc. You could also add some ideas/RFCs for how me might change things.
Also, feel free to experiment. If some maintainers want a more collaborative sort of maintainership, why not try it out (as long as it's opt-in)? Just let people know, maybe add a line '# Please fix me!' to your .info files. If the system starts working well, perhaps soon we'll all want to adopt it.
Dave
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