[Mageia-dev] Maintainers policy

Sat Apr 16 15:30:55 CEST 2011

On Wed, 13 Apr 2011, Anne nicolas wrote:
+
+> Following tonight's meeting, we will start one week discussion about
+> maintainers policy. Some questions to be discussed:
+>
+> - shall we have ACL's on svn, submits?
+> - what about having co-maintenership or teams? How shall we manage this?
+> - what about sensitive packages ?
+> ...
+>
+> Pleas make any comments and proposals we could discus to build it.
+> Final decisions will be taken during next packagers meeting (20th of
+> april)
+
+There seem to be two issues here:
+
+1. A maintainer database, with rules for updating the db
+    This does not have to change package submission or svn access,
+    but can be used for bug assignment, mailing package check reports and
+    package svn commit logs, etc.
+
+2. Restrictions on:
+   a) maintainer db modifications
+   b) package submission and/or svn access, based on the contents of the
+      maintainer db
+
+Of course those 2 issues are related: any upload restrictions allowed by 
+policy must be supported in the maintainer db. We don't need to implement 
+everying at once, however. A maintainer db without upload restrictions 
+will already be a big improvement over the current situation.
+
+
+There are 2 kinds of groups:
+   maintainer groups = several people listed as maintainer for one package
+   package groups = several packages that are maintained as if they were a
+                    single package, so they always have the same list of
+                    maintainers
+
+IMHO both features should be supported by the maintainer database:
+   - Restricted packages (if allowed) must have at least 2 maintainers.
+     This should make it less likely that change requests are simply
+     ignored.
+   - Maintainer groups can also be useful for unrestricted packages,
+     e.g. to divide the work on a large source package.
+   - Package groups are likely needed for some software systems like gnome
+     and X11 that are split into many smaller source packages.
+
+Here's a partial proposal for phase 1/unrestricted packages:
+
+- anyone can register as maintainer for a (source) package
+- maintainers can unregister at any time
+- the "oldest" maintainer (first one registered) is primary maintainer,
+   officially responsible for the package
+- package groups are defined by the project (is there any other way?)
+- the maintainer db redirects requests on a package in a group to the
+   package group (with an error msg?)
+
+
+     Christiaan
+