[Mageia-dev] Review Of Bugs

Mon Oct 31 23:16:07 CET 2011

'Twas brillig, and Michael Scherer at 31/10/11 21:44 did gyre and gimble:
+> Le lundi 31 octobre 2011 à 21:06 +0000, Colin Guthrie a écrit :
+>> 'Twas brillig, and Maarten Vanraes at 31/10/11 20:55 did gyre and gimble:
+>>> Op maandag 31 oktober 2011 21:34:04 schreef D.Morgan:
+>>> [...]
+>>>>> But seriously, if we can't maintain/fix something like chromium-browser,
+>>>>> we should just drop it completely, maybe have a get-chromium package
+>>>>> instead
+>>>>
+>>>> why ? i package it regularly and tvignaud too.
+>>>> what about dropping all packages that have bugs ?  this is just stupid
+>>>> and you should first ask ppl packaging it before giving such ideas
+>>>
+>>> ok, i get it, (allthough i did say "IF") I guess it's a misguided attempt of 
+>>> myself to get more maintainership...
+>>
+>> I think the attempts to get more official partnerships by Samuel and
+>> yourself are very valuable, but by the same token, I think we need to
+>> accept that having a single maintainer for some packages just doens't
+>> make sense.
+>>
+>> For example things like initscripts, udev, systemd etc. should be
+>> maintained by a "core" team, and IMO, not a single person (tho' if
+>> someone steps up and is proven to be reliable then this is obviously not
+>> a bad thing per-se!). I'm certainly happy to help out here.
+> 
+> Well, so far, the system do not support this.
+
+Indeed.
+
+> So either this supposed team is able to organise itself to have one of
+> the member to act as a gate to take maitainership and dispatch task
+
+I think both socially and expectation wise, being a the gatekeeper in
+such context still carries a lot of responsibility that people would not
+feel too comfortable with, nor would there necessarily be the social
+hierarchy where said gatekeeper would feel sufficiently authorised to
+dish out tasks to others.
+
+> or someone patch the maintdb script to have more than one person.
+
+This would be better, or perhaps "team accounts" can be created which
+forward mail to the members rather than having multiple maintainers..
+not sure if this is easier infrastructure wise or not but the net
+outcome is the same either ways so whatever makes more sense.
+
+> As long as "being managed by several people" will be seen the same way
+> as "maintained by nobody", we will have the same problem as mandriva.
+
+Personally I don't buy that explanation. Of course it can be true in
+some cases (everyone just waits for someone else to fix it) but I
+suspect the odds of things getting fixed is still much higher than when
+a package is officially maintained by nobody...
+
+> Being maintained officially by someone do not prevent others to help. 
+> So I do not see any good reason to have them marked as nobody.
+
+I certainly don't expect a package maintained by a team to be marked as
+nobody (well, certainly not longer term). But again, I think even
+allocating a gatekeeper or a team leader puts too many social pressures
+on that person, and imposes something of a hierarchy that really doesn't
+seem appropriate. Also things don't happen automatically - such as all
+the team members getting CC'ed on bugzilla etc which would make it quite
+a lot of admin work for said gatekeeper on top of the actual bug fixes
+which again I think is too much.
+
+I think things need to work automatically as much as possible with loose
+couplings rather than appointed leaders. We need to get teams (either
+via team accounts or by multiple maintainers) and ensure that when a bug
+is assigned to a team, that all members get emails about it (perhaps as
+separate CC's allowing someone in the team to assign the bug to
+themselves but still keep the others included in the communications -
+although this could also be done with the QA contact field in BZ I think
+(we use it in a similar way in PA with the fd.o bugzilla) although just
+ensuring everyone knows to add the team email to the CC when assigning
+to themselves would be enough).
+
+Obviously someone needs to do the work to make the infrastructure cope
+with this :s Let's form a team to see who'll do it... :p
+
+Col
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+