On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Markos Chandras <[email protected]> wrote: > > Finally, I am very proud with the work we are doing, especially Pacho > who has been doing most of the work lately. We have managed to "free" > many many packages and this was one of the reasons I formed the > proxy-maintainers project, so that non-dev contributors could step up > and take care of all these packages that inactive devs left > unattended. >
I see "free" as "dump a lot of orthogonally related packages on to the herd that is listed but really the other herd members aren't interested in those packages. So over time we go from a herd that had decent number of semi-active developers that handled a large swath of the packages to only a handful of active devs who are only interested in a select few packages with no support for all those other packages. Because the result was you could prod the semi-active guys about the packages they maintained and they would fix something or they'd give you feedback on something you might do to test it. Once they're retired, the magical list of person X has knowledge of Y goes away (metadata.xml). If you're curious if I'm speaking about a specific herd, I am. It's media-tv. IMHO, if you're really after finding others to take care of packages that appear abandoned then you should contact the inactive people to see if there's any packages they'd be ok with giving up to the proxy-maintainers project or to another developer, but don't retire them. The reason I say ask them about packages is that they might appear to be inactive because they really are only maintaining one or two packages that infrequently get any activity, but when they package gets activity they jump on it and fix it right away. I know that was the case for me when I was busy with RL things for a while. But there were a number of packages my employer paid me to maintain and I did. All the other packages that had my name on them I just didn't have the time. If the goal here really is to ensure well maintained packages then retiring people is akin to treating a screw like a nail and banging it in with a hammer, wrong tool... wrong job. For some packages you may find another developer right away with interest to fix it, or a proxy maintainer but in some cases you might have just kicked the only person who had any inclination to fix the package. Some packages have 50 users and 49 of them are Gentoo developers or would step up and become Gentoo developers to fix the package should it become unmaintained and that's great. But some packages have 200 users and 1 person willing to be the developer to maintain it. You retire that person and you might have well just told those 200 people to pick a different distro because inevitably their package will be treecleaned. If you need a concrete example of a package, that would be MythTV. I've been hoping for the day that someone becomes a Gentoo developer with the goal of maintaining MythTV for nearly a decade but it hasn't happened. If I stop touching it, it languishes and I get e-mails and bugs, etc. I tell everyone they are more than welcome to maintain it and 99% of the time nothing comes of it, and 1% of the time someone does 1 bump for me and nothing more again. Regarding my use of the words "brain dead", notice I never said "Markos is brain dead". What I said was the policy of retiring people when what you really want is an active maintainer of packages is brain dead. Now I understand that you're involved with the enforcement of that policy and therefore identify with it, but I would have to encourage you to separate yourself from a policy. I unfortunately feel after reading all the comments in this whole thread that my original statement is still true. Well that felt like a Duncan e-mail so its time to wrap it up. -- Doug Goldstein
