Re: [ports discussion] enforcing maintainership?

On 2022/05/01 01:01, Marc Espie wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 08:43:13PM +0100, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> > On 2022/04/30 16:37, Solène Rapenne wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I don't know if it has been debated before but I'd like to propose a
> > > change, or at least discuss about it.
> > >
> > > - people submitting new ports must become maintainer
> > >
> > > - ports without a maintainer must find a maintainer
> > >
> > > - ports where the maintainer is getting removed or not answering MUST
> > > find a new maintainer
> >
> > strong dislike.
>
>
> I'm with Stuart on this, but I will elaborate.
>
> Our current problem is having enough developers to handle the flow of ports.
>
> As far as porting new stuff/updating stuff goes, sometimes people will do
> the work, but do not want to commit to maintainership. If we try to enforce
> that, we may actually push some people away.
>
> I don't see any real problem this would solve.
>
> In an ideal world, we would have three times as many dedicated people curating
> the tree. But we want relevant ports to keep coming.
>

Also, a port with an unresponsive maintainer is a block to someone else
doing work in ports (either the port itself, or another one which requires
changes in some port).

You might say this covers it:

> > > - ports where the maintainer is getting removed or not answering MUST
> > > find a new maintainer

But then what if nobody wants to take maintainer for something which is
a dependency of a bunch of other ports? Remove them all? Who is going to
do that? It's actually quite delicate work.

For ports which I have written, I tend to take maintainer if I want to
review changes to that port (either something I use fairly often, maybe
in production) or know that it's a tricky one, otherwise I often won't
because I don't want to block other people working on it.