[sane-devel] [janitorial] project member list and maintenance status clean up

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi all,

You may remember that about two months ago, I mailed the list[1] asking
project members to reconfirm whether they still considered themselves a
SANE developer.

 [1] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/sane-devel/2016-October/034843.html

That process has now been completed.  The list is now 19 members long,
down from 58!  I've removed 40 old members and Allan added one new one.
Welcome Dave!

I have updated Git write access info in the AUTHORS file accordingly.

I've also started updating backend maintenance info in the descriptions
file, using the simple rule that only backends with an AUTHOR with git
write access are to be considered maintained.  If I were to follow that
rule strictly it would mean an extra *50* unmaintained backends, on top
of the 18 already marked as such, leaving only 22 out of 90 backends as
maintained.

The "newly" unmaintained backends would include the widely used 'dll'
and 'net' meta backends as well as some backends that have received
significant changes (i.e. other than compiler warning fixes).  Seeing
that, I wasn't sure whether this changeset should be pushed.

What do you think?  Should I just go ahead and make it clear that a
*lot* of backends are unmaintained and leave it up to project members to
start maintaining the ones they care about?

# I may pick up some meta-backends myself.  Then again, I may not.

I was also thinking about adding a :maintainer field to the description
files, in favour of the "unmaintained" in the :version field.  It would
help with assigning tracker items and be more specific than "an AUTHOR
with git write access".  Just because people wrote and/or changed a
significant chunk of a backend doesn't mean they intend to maintain it.

Does that sound like a good idea?  If so, I'll add it and seed it with
the AUTHOR(S) with Git write access.  I think I'll also need to fiddle a
bit with the sane-desc.c code to make it grok the new field.

The "unmaintained" bit in the :version can then be removed as well.  Any
backends without :maintainer fields (yes, plural because there can be
more than one) are automatically unmaintained.

BTW, I don't think that a :maintainer *needs* to be a project member,
although it sure would make things like assigning tracker items a bit
easier ;-)

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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