[oe] Package Maintenance

[Chris Larson]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 2:06 AM, Richard Purdie <rpurdie at rpsys.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 13:35 -0700, Chris Larson wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Chris Larson <clarson at kergoth.com> 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.
>>
>> If no one is against this, I'd say we should start taking ownership of
>> packages and setting MAINTAINER in the recipes, after ensuring that
>> the packaging code won't put MAINTAINER into the packages.
>>
>> Unless someone else wants them, as a start, I'd be willing to take
>> autoconf, automake, libtool, and perhaps autotools.bbclass, though
>> there's no good mechanism to record that.
>
> Can we use something other than the MAINTAINER variable? The package
> classes inject that value into the packages and that is really something
> that should be set by the distribution. I'd don't want to end up back in
> the position where that variable doesn't have a clear meaning.
>
> It was also intended that the Maintainers file we added when MAINTAINERS
> were removes would replace these variables in individual recipes. That
> file format was designed to be machine readable so someone could have
> written a script to find out who maintained a class/.bb/.conf file. This
> has the advantage that is can handle .bbclass file maintainership which
> is an issue with the MAINTAINERS variable...

Well, that works too, I don't particularly care how we do it, as long
as we do it :)  Is the Maintainers file actually being maintained? ;)
-- 
Chris Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
clarson at mvista dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Software Engineer
MontaVista Software, Inc.