Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
Instead of everybody that are doing needed work in the distribution
having to run around after maintainers trying to find out if they are
still active or not and initiate the unresponsive maintainer policy,
cant we revert the process and have maintainer(s) having to reassure
their ownership on their package(s) at the begin of each development
cycle and if they dont do that before x time, the package(s) they
maintain will be automatically orphaned and given up for someone else to
grab and take ownership before x time runs out and if nobody does they
get remove from the distribution?
That is only going to annoy existing active contributors, who have really
other things to do than to go clicking on a button for every package every 6
months!
It's bad enough that we had that FPCA to agree on (in a big hurry, after the
old ICLA had served us well for years) and now the password and SSH key to
change (for no reason). Hassling us with even more "hey, I'm still there"
buttons to click on won't help at all.
I cant image how much resources across the project have been spent
on
packages that no longer are being actively maintained but have not been
removed from the distribution.
I think actually not that much. And for a user, it's usually better to have
a package available, even if it's poorly maintained, than to not have it at
all! Removing a package also leads to upgrade path issues such as broken
dependencies in the dropped package when the user upgrades to a newer
Fedora. This really should only be an absolute last resort if the package
cannot be made to work at all.
Kevin Kofler