[Mageia-discuss] MANDATORY READ : 7 days before misc unleashes CERBERUS !

[Juergen Harms]

On 09/16/2011 10:43 PM, Maarten Vanraes wrote:
> This is exactly why Stormi's idea is a great one, welcome i should say: look
> around for a mentor, ask andre999 about it (he's the mentoring coordinator)...
>
I will. And sorry, my message went away from my drafts folder 
accidentally before it was spelled out risks to sound crude. Some more 
details on my thoughts (and picking up what has been said about creating 
groups):

(1) Stormi's idea is particularly adapted to a community distro - and I 
agree, if community members (nearly) at large contribute to package 
maintenance, they may need some backing up. Doing this by organising 
groups on the basis of implementation languages may be very helpful 
while looking for maintainers. Once the work goes on, there may be more 
specific needs. Take my example: with backuppc I might come on questions 
to people who know the wheels in apache, or with geda I might need 
putting straight with GUI questions. Might be a good idea to put some 
thought into organising that - maybe just a slight twist to the mageia 
dev mailing list (and maybe after an initial period of gathering 
experience).

(2) I have had a close look at the package list: throwing out "nobody" 
packages in an un-organised way, just following considerations whether 
incidentlally a package has been picked up or not, risks crippling 
Mageia into a distro that does not stand up to other distros (just look 
at editors - a distro without ed, sed, emax, xemacs ?) Before the 
cerberos comes with a big guillotine, there should at least be a first 
phase when a list of "absolutely required packages" has been defined, 
for which maintainers need to be actively defined (using thumb screws, 
chantage - what is the english word? - if need be) - and this might work 
better once the present search for volonteers has established a broader 
base of known candidates. That requires some time - a 1-week cerberos 
would not allow for that.

(3) Again with the example of backuppc and geda in mind: both have 
strong upstream activities, active and competent mailing lists. I have 
no idea, how traditionally maintainership is organised in front of such 
a background. I will certainly need to sign up for these lists (again - 
I quit after an initial phase - too much traffic). Do down-stream 
distros have a particular standing with upstream parents?

(4) Apropos "I have no idea": it might be helpful if a few lines of text 
would exist that describe the duties and the normal way of "functioning" 
of a maintainer.