Hi, I've been wanting to ask for a long time already: wouldn't it be about time to start switching to an explicit "closed maintainer" policy instead?
That is: having to explicitly declare ports to be under a closed maintainer policy, while keeping openmaintainer as default otherwise. Of course that means having a transition period until all ports define either one or the other, and only then drop the openmaintainer keyword. What's currently slightly suboptimal is that many new contributors create a new port and put their name on them. It feels strange to explain to each one of them that they should probably put an "openmaintainer" label to their new port, most likely keeping many of them somewhat offended. For maintainers without commit rights (and potentially just submitting something and never returning back) it's additionally problematic. This leads to many ports being under "closed maintainer" policy "by mistake", very often those are in fact even abandoned ones, forcing other developers to have to use maintainer timeout to do any changes (or often not do any changes at all because they forget or no longer care by the time they would be allow to make the change), as well as spreading a general subconscious belief that it's just OK to mess with closed maintainer ports. We could potentially define a different keywoard instead of misusing the "maintainer" keyword. And if there's a need, we could of course define more levels of "how closed" a port should be. This is another case where for a lot of software updates are usually trivial, while for others it may break your system (say, when software switches from C++98 to C++17 and completely changes the API :), so the question of whether an update counts as a trivial update probably varies wildly from one port to the other. >From my personal perspective: I want to keep most of my ports openmaintainer because I want others to contribute and neighter want nor need exclusive rights over ports. But there might be cases when I have a bunch of changes pending, or I know that a bunch of dependent ports will break after update ... which is why I still appreciate that people don't just randomly commit changes behind my back. A PR giving me more than 24 hours time to go through the changes (to at least be informed and have time to object) is helpful. Mojca
