[Mageia-dev] Package adoption campaign, 3 months later

[Kamil Rytarowski]

W dniu 08.12.2011 11:04, Samuel Verschelde pisze:
> Hi,
>
> I consider the (first phase of) the adoption campaign finished, so here are some
> stats about it, and an opening for discussion about what to do next.
>
> We had 4931 packages without a maintainer, we now have 2043, so I think we can
> say that the campaign was a success in this regard : nearly 3000 source
> packages have found a maintainer.
>
> See http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/data/unmaintained.txt for the list of orphan
> packages.
>
> Out of 57 packagers with submit rights (I might have missed a few that got
> submit rights recently, but it wont change the results much):
> - 35 are now "full" (or even took too much packages)
> - 11 answered at some point that they were going to have a look at the list
> and maybe grab more packages, but didn't give me feedback after that, even
> after a new mail sent. We can suppose that they are now "full" too.
> - 6 are inactive (no packaging in months)
> - 5 well-known active packagers never answered in 3 months either to the
> mailing list or to my direct mails (sent at @mageia.org addresses), which is a
> bit disappointing considering the amount of time I put into this campaign, but
> I want to thank the vast majority who was really willing to help in this
> campaign.
Hello, I just inform that I was collecting the data for this action, the 
stats are here http://kamil.mageia.org.pl/MageiaStats/ it says about the 
daily ration of the maintained and the unmaintained packages + how many 
full-packagers maintain at least a single package.

> The conclusion is that for most packagers the maintainers database is now up
> to date, with maybe a few more orphan packages that could find a maintainer,
> but not a lot.
>
> I would have liked that there be no need for such a campaign, but events
> showed that there's a real need for someone who sends reminders to the mailing
> lists, pings packagers, points out important orphan packages. Waiting for
> things to solve themselves doesn't work :) However, this demands a lot of
> energy and I would be glad if someone could replace me in this task, because I
> lack time to develop Mageia App Db. I volunteered only because there was a gap
> to fulfill, but would be glad to see someone else become the official Orphan
> Packages Protector.
>
> His/her work would be the following:
> - identifiy (with bugsquad's help) the orphan packages that have lots of
> unresolved bugs or are severely outdated,
> - do the same for packages that have a maintainer but are in a similar
> situation,
> - try to find packagers or apprentices to take care of them. Not necessarily
> make them become maintainer, but at least solve users bugs.
> - try to find maintainers for orphan packages.
>
> I'm willing to help with advice or tools but would like to not be the person
> in charge, if possible, so that I can really make the Mageia App Db available
> before Mageia 2.
>
> Does someone volunteer? It is a job that demands a lot of energy and
> confidence, but I think it would be a really useful contribution. Bugsquad is
> already doing part of this, but they have other duties, so someone dedicated
> to this task could maybe help.
Before we start to do that, do you remember about these words:
 >Currently the data about ownership of packages is tracked in 
http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/data/maintdb.txt and umaintined packages are 
listed in http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/data/unmaintained.txt. This will 
be better integrated and managed at a later point, and we will have a 
grace period for unmaintained packages. After the grace period, packages 
without a maintainer will be reviewed and any packages without a 
maintainer will be nominated for deletion.

source https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packaging_guidelines

I look into many really abandoned packages, without any interest among 
the packagers, and for some of them it's even quite hard to find any 
on-line resource.. For example cpuinfo, it's a /proc/* parser for CPU 
related data. It's 2-3 years old (so what about the new hardware?!), 
even the author of the software isn't responding to e-mail to just point 
a working URL for his software.
> Best regards
>
> Samuel Verschelde
Regards