On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:28:11 +0200
Sven Lankes <sven(a)lank.es> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 03:28:42PM +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> I think we should add some policy to address those unmaintained
>> packages,
> There is the non-responsive maintainer policy already.
That policy isn't the easiest one to follow though. I understand that
taking someones packages away should never be easy but maybe we could
develop some metrics for the awolness of a maintainer and use that to
possibly speed up the process.
I would love a better policy. It's hard to balance tho... between
someone who is just busy and someone who is really missing. ;(
I think one thing that would help is perhaps to form a group that looks
for these people (possibly using what you are talking about below),
tries to contact them and if that fails marks them as missing.
I know that seth worked on something similar based on commit
frequency. What I could think of is:
* Look at the FAS activity
If a maintainer has multiple request for commit rights to his
package which have not been answered in a long time that would
increase his awolness counter.
(This would mean that we need to encourage people to actually deny
requests that they don't want to approve - currently it seems to be
accepted that denying a request is rude and the more polite way to
not approve a commit request is to just ignore it).
I'm not sure just not acting on a request there is a sign of awol.
They could just be waiting for the person to prove themselves, or some
other reason. But if there is no pkgdb activity at all, I think thats
an indicator perhaps.
* Check if he actually has a current certificate to interface with
koji
Good idea.
* Look at koji activity
Yep.
If a maintainer hasn't done any build in koji for three months
or
more that would increase his awolness counter.
yeah, or any git commits, etc.
The awolness-counter would only be looked at when someone thinks
about
starting the awol procedure and it could be used to speed up the
process
Should we wait until someone starts the process?
Wouldn't it be better to look at all the people over a X value here and
at least contact them. Are you alive and still willing to be a
maintainer? If you don't have time perhaps hand off your packages?
Thanks?
- maybe get an non-responsive Maintainer procedure done in one week
instead of four or five.
Yeah, added with all the info above and other stuff we can gather.
People do go away for weeks at a time and are just on vacation, etc.
I know that there is the "Fast Track procedure" but that is
for when
"it may be needed to reassign a package quickly". When I was bit by
gdal being in FTBFS for too long (and with it merkaartor which I
maintain) I commented on the bugs and waited a while. When that
didn't do anything I email Christian and also started work on a fixed
package which rsc then built for rawhide using his provenpackager
powers.
That is a downside to provenpackagers.
"Hey would you fix this thing for me" "ok".
Then we don't know that anyone is maintaining it.
I could have stopped there (and I nearly had done that) without
starting the policy procedure - just because the process requires the
one interested in getting things fix to do five or six things each a
week apart. And looking at the number of "awaitaing review"
maintainers there have been a few people before me who wanted to help
get things fixed ...
Yeah, but then we don't really have a maintainer answering bug reports,
etc.
> It can't be repeated often enough: We need maintainers for
each and
> every package in the collection. To have packages and bug reports
> assigned to an inactive person A with provenpackager B doing random
> upgrades from time to time is a broken system. B ought to become
> the maintainer instead. And C and D and E in the community also
> ought to consider joining the package's team of maintainers, too.
I agree. But we also need to make it easier for people to do so - if
you look at
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/gdal
(which is one of rezsos packages), it has 6 users with "Awaiting
Review" on commit rights. It's not that people don't want to help out
but we're making it too hard for them to do so.
Yep. I would love a more comprehensive policy being proposed to fesco.
Write one up? ;)
kevin