Enforcing the 2nd maintainer rule, was: Bug#444368: ITP: dvd95 -- DVD9 to DVD5 converter

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 9:55 AM, Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 04.06.2013, 07:37 +0200 schrieb Reinhard Tartler:
>> It still seems to lack a 2nd person to back up the package in the team.
>
> Hm, I question the purpose of this rule. It seems to me to keep useful
> packages out of the archive; packages that I do not sign up for as an
> Uploader, because I do not know about their existence, because they are
> not in the archive...

Well, it depends what you want pkg-multimedia to be.

A package without a second supporter is de facto not team maintained,
but maintained by a single person. You do not need a team for such
packages, on contrary, they just add overhead to the team (as in, PET,
mailing lists, team RC bug count, etc.). In these cases, I think you
are much better off with keeping them in collab-maint.

My motivation for enforcing this rule is to avoid pkg-multimedia
becoming a specialized QA Team. I mean, seriously, if you want that,
then please put "Debian QA Team" as maintainer.

Also, please consider the bus factor. Imagine some pkg-multimedia
member, who has introduced 20 packages to pkg-multimedia, gets hit by
a bus. What is the team supposed to do with the packages? Since nobody
else didn't even bother to put himself as uploader, it is quite likely
that his 20 packages end up unmaintained. Again, orphaning the package
seems like a good answer to that, which in this case is unlikely to
happen since de jure, the package is labeled as "team maintained",
although de facto, nobody cares for it. That's why consider packages
without 2nd uploader as harmful to the team.

I would therefore suggest to stage packages without maintainer in
collab-maint, and as soon as a 2nd pkg-multimedia member agrees to
support it, just move the repo to pkg-multimedia, and good.

-- 
regards,
    Reinhard