[oe] Package Maintenance

[Chris Larson]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Junqian Gordon Xu <xjqian at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 03/24/2009 01:36 PM, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
>>
>> Disadvantage of a Maintainers file is that it is yet another file to
>> update when you create a package (adjacent to the checksums file and
>> of course the package recipe). Guess it will be forgotten regularly.
>>
>> Also I fear we're going to end up with a lot of orphaned packages.
>
> One possibility is to get statistics about the committer from the last X
> commits, calculate the mean and standard deviation (STD) of the age of the
> last X commits to indicate how likely the maintainer is alive, and
> automatically update the Maintainer file every month. There will be other
> details to discuss, but the maintainer file would look something like this.
>
> Recipe name     Maintainer      Mean Age (last 5)       STD (last 5)
>
> gcc             Koen            2 month                 10 days
> binutils        RP              1 year                  2 month

That's an interesting possibility.  I'd thought about looking at the
committers, but didn't think about using the age.  How would you
handle something that's had 3 commits by one person and 2 by another?
And those 3 were minor bugfixes by a contributer, not someone who
plans on taking any responsibility for the state of the recipe? :)
-- 
Chris Larson
clarson at kergoth dot com
clarson at mvista dot com
Founder - BitBake, OpenEmbedded, OpenZaurus
Maintainer - Tslib
Software Engineer
MontaVista Software, Inc.