On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:03:43 -0800 Jesse Keating jkeating@j2solutions.net wrote:
This has come up nearly every release cycle. Problem is that nobody can seem to agree on what an appropriate "sign of life" would be, no has made a serious FESCo proposal for a contrived sign of life.
I don't think anybody disagrees (well maybe KKoffler) that unmaintained software should be discovered and ejected from the distro, the entirety of the problem lies how to discover (as well as side issues about what to do about maintainers that are active for one package, but completely ignore 3 others, etc…)
So if you are serious about wanting this fixed, draft a proposal, figure out who's going to do the coding work, and bring it to FESCo.
To quote Ajax: +!
I think the current policy is not very ideal either, but haven't had time/energy to work out a new one. ;)
My last thought was to come up with a automated/script way to gather info from: bugzilla, pkgdb, koji, git, mailing lists, etc and output a list of 'likely inactive people'. Then, have a group of humans look at the list, and try and contact/ping people. With no reply after a timeperiod, orphan their packages.
Note that we need to balance here cases like:
* maintainer is very active, just ignoring $leafpackage right now. * maintainer is on vacation/sick/etc * maintainer needs help, we should try and help them out. * maintainer doesn't use our bugzilla as their primary bug zone. * maintainer maintains a software that has a vast number of bugs and they can't deal with them all. * maintainer is working on higher priority bug, so ignoring feature requests/etc.
Anyhow, I for one would welcome written up, concrete proposals here.
kevin