[pkg-go] Fwd: Updating the pkg-go Team Maintenance policy

[Martín Ferrari]

On 04/02/16 18:57, Michael Stapelberg wrote:
> I’m also in support of it.
>
> In case nobody else chimes in with an objection, I’ll commit it this
> weekend.

Sorry I am this late to the discussion, you probably have commited the
new version by now.. Still I would like to voice my opinion for future
iterations of the policy.


I am sad to have missed this (I just kept saving the thread for when 'I
had time' to properly read it), as I think this is an issue I always
cared about, and hoped that it would move in a different direction from
what the discussion went to.

I started my life in Debian in the Perl group, and so it shaped my views
pretty strongly. I always felt that was a very welcoming place, for
newbies and old-timers, where work was always appreciated, and you did
not feel alienated if you could not devote so much time sometimes (and I
finally stopped working there at some point).

It was very low-stress, and the group succeeds in maintaining an obscene
number of packages with not so many active members. With many members
staying for years, and old members are still friends. I don't remember
any fight, just many calm technical discussions.

A big part of all this "utopia" I am painting here - I believe - is that
nobody "owned" a package. You only put your name in Uploaders before
uploading, but you did not need to ask permission from anybody, because
the owner was the group as a whole. So, instead of asking for
permissions to fix bugs, you only discussed with the group bigger
matters, like mass-commits, changes in tooling, etc.

If you go away, most of the time nobody actually needs you to continue
working. And I feel very relieved that I don't need to be committed for
life to all the packages I have ever uploaded there.

To address one concern about a more open policy; to avoid clashes, you
never assume that nobody will touch the package unless you ask somehow.
In that case, you would just leave a note in the changelog, asking other
not to upload, and/or asking for help. For example, in this[1] commit.



So, again, sorry for being this late to the conversation, but I hope we
can discuss this approach for a next version.

Tincho.

[1]:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-perl/packages/libmemcached-libmemcached-perl.git/commit/?id=e780b94

-- 
Martín Ferrari (Tincho)