Re: Adopt a patch!

[ng0 <ng0@infotropique.org>]

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Arun Isaac transcribed 0.9K bytes:
> 
> Would it help to have teams of maintainers for specific packages or a
> specific category of packages? Perhaps something like Debian has? Right
> now, anyone can review any package. But, no one is "responsible" for any
> package, and this feels a little chaotic.

As far as I see it we already have teams, just sometimes they change or
work together / blend together. For example I do mostly mail, crypto,
IM and WM related stuff but I also have other things on my list which is
due to another project and should hopefully get taken over as more people
join there.
A group of the same people does R. We have one person doing Icecat and linux-libre.
etc. Of course some packages are left behind at the moment, but you can
step on no ones toes by updating them (which happens more often in
maintainer-per-package OS').

> Also, should we accept any package into Guix (provided it is free
> software, of course)? Or, should we pick and choose, packaging only
> sufficiently mature software? What about unmaintained packages? Debian's
> policy is to remove unmaintained packages. What is ours? Perhaps we need
> some kind of package popularity contest like Debian has.

No. I think as long as the source exists it can find its way into Guix.
As soon as security issues start to show up or other problems, we are
dealing with it. There's a policy already we follow (it might not be
written down of course).
I also think that people will take on packages they need as soon as
they realize that no one will be the person they think that could
update the package they are looking at. It's very hands on and if
when the documentation can express this in an empowering way, it's
good. To just expect that "this group will handle it" doesn't
help in the long run.
For example getmail is considered to be "finished" many years ago
by the author, it simply gets tiny fixes and occasionally features
added when people ask for them. It's mostly in maintenance mode.
We look at python packages and don't package unmaintained ones
if they are absolutely not needed. For example I approach upstream
if I see outdated pythong packages and ask for a resolution.
Maybe we should write our current approach to this down. I don't
think a polpularity contest would do any good.

> These questions are bothering me, because I feel we don't have
> sufficient labour power to handle the enormous number of packages out
> there. I've been meaning to raise these questions at some point. Though
> these questions are somewhat tangential to this thread, I thought it
> might be ok to raise them here.
> 
> 

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ng0
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