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

Felipe Sateler fsateler at debian.org
Wed Jun 5 17:28:18 UTC 2013


On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree with the principle behind the rule, but perhaps the rule is
not the best way to enforce the principle?

Brainstorm follows, posibly lousy idea:

Change the rule to say that packages maintained by the team cannot
have less than 2 uploaders, but first uploads are allowed to have only
one uploader. This could help in breaking the vicious loop presented
by Fabian.

Then, have a daily cron job scan the archive for packages maintained
by the team, and flag packages with less than 2 uploaders older than N
days. Send the resulting list to the team list.

If nobody wants to help comaintain a package for M days, the package
should be moved to collab-maint or some other area.

The principle is similar to the wnpp mails sent to -devel.

--

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler



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