[Mageia-dev] Review Of Bugs

[Colin Guthrie]

'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/

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