On Mar 19, 2006, at 6:26 PM, Dave Vasilevsky wrote:
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.
Looks like you didn't quote one of my statements: "No one approach best fits all package types, so how about a 'Lead-Maintainer' field? If specified, this is the person who must approve all changes in new versions."
So I'm not suggesting a less restrictive maintenance model should be used *all* the time, just most of the time. There will always be certain cases, like your Gnome example, where a single maintainer is required for stability.
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.
Looks like Alexander Hansen has already done that for me. :)
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.
Sounds good. Trevor
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