Please elaborate on how a "full.fledged developer" would differ from a "package maintainer" technically. What requirements and/or priviledges do you think could be reduced?
I haven't thought that through fully (in hopes of a few good suggestions!), but off the top of my head, maintainers don't need to complete the staff quiz. On the technical side, about the only thing they really require is a sound knowledge of bash, the do's and don'ts of ebuilds, and knowledge of how to use eclasses. Perhaps we can create a separate quiz for maintainers, which stresses on versioning, handling bump requests, keeping ebuilds clean etc, and nothing more. I'm willing to help form the quiz, but I certainly can't do it alone.
As for the privileges, maintainers wouldn't need an email account, commit access to portions not concerning their package(s), voice on #gentoo-dev... Essentially, we need to keep limit the privileges to whatever infra can provide within reasonable limits - I expect the number of maintainers to be far greater than the developer count.
On another note, we may introduce a rule that no package may be marked stable unless a "full-fledged developer" or QA member has approved it (along with the usual arch-tester stamp). This might help in ensuring the quality of our stable tree.
-- Anant -- [email protected] mailing list
