[oe] Package Maintenance

[Chris Larson]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Koen Kooi <k.kooi at student.utwente.nl> wrote:
> On 17-03-09 20:18, Chris Larson wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to propose re-establishing MAINTAINER, set per package, to
>> individuals, or left as default for packages which aren't directly
>> maintained.
>>
>> Doing this would:
>> - Facilitate dumping a list of unmaintained packages to give to new
>> users wanting to volunteer to help us, but not knowing how to
>> contribute.
>> - Return some individual responsibility to the project, giving one
>> person the blame for brokenness for that package, as well as giving
>> responsibility for pushing patches upstream to that person.  In my
>> opinion, a number of the recent issues in the project are due, in
>> part, to a lack of that individual responsibility.  Everything is
>> fuzzy, determined by a group, instead.
>> - Allow us to physically separate, in the repository, those packages
>> which get the most attention (are maintained) from those which get the
>> least (maintained by the entire team).  We could finally be *honest*
>> with our users about what we work on, telling them that the packages
>> which are maintained by the team are in need of an individual
>> maintainer, and get less attention, so bugs there will be fixed more
>> slowly, and there are no guarantees on functionality there.  I think
>> it'd be better to have a core set of *functional* recipes than have a
>> huge set of "might work, might not" recipes as things stand today.  In
>> my opinion, this would be more likely to give new users stability than
>> creating a stable branch, while making better use of our limited
>> manpower, rather than increasing the load drastically.
>>
>> Opinions?
>
> As long as it doesn't get put in resulting packages in any way, it's fine by
> me.

Good point, I don't think anyone wants to get emails from people who
found the MAINTAINER contact info in ipk files in feeds via google :)
-- 
Chris Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
clarson at mvista dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Software Engineer
MontaVista Software, Inc.