Timothy Redaelli wrote: [Fri Feb 02 2007, 04:17:32AM CST] > I want to propose a "Maintainer Timeout" such as FreeBSD. > If a maintainer or herd does not fix (or assign/comment) a bug in a > reasonable amount of time (2 weeks? 3 month?) any developer can fix it > (or a pre established group of developers such as QA)
It seems to me that this is an area where common sense and trust really should win out. If you've made a reasonable effort to contact the maintainer, to no avail, and you can competently fix the bug, then go fix it and e-mail the maintainer what you've done. What's a reasonable time? Well, that's where the common sense comes in. If somebody just broke libpng and all of its dependencies, then you don't really want to spend much time waiting. (Of course, in such an extreme case it might be best to drop the problem on QA.) On the other hand, if the bug is a version bump, then the waiting time had best be a good long time, since there may be a very good reason why the new version isn't in the tree and the maintainer just left on his or her honeymoon. (Although in that case it wouldn't hurt for the dev to package.mask the offending package without putting it in the tree, since that way there would be a record that the package was deliberately left out, and there'd be a warning if a hapless user tried to add it via an overlay.) I have mixed feelings on the notion of "ownership" of ebuilds. When Gentoo had only a handful of devs, the tree was almost entirely collectively owned by all devs, with baselayout and portage being the only packages that were labelled "don't touch unless you really know what you're doing". Pretty much everybody who had time fixed bugs in ebuilds in the tree, whether the ebuilds "belonged" to them or not. Today we have many more packages that require specialist knowledge to maintain (either because the individual packages are extremely complicated, or because they are part of an integrated system of packages), and the devs that maintain those packages are understandably touchy about having other devs break those ebuilds. For the majority of packages in the tree, though, I'd like to encourage their maintainers to be less possessive. If somebody wants to fix bugs in ebuilds that I maintain, go right ahead. Just don't break it in the process, please. -g2boojum- -- Grant Goodyear Gentoo Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
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