From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: Adopt a patch! Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2017 22:04:22 +0200 Message-ID: <87d16pf5x5.fsf@gnu.org> References: <877ex5d555.fsf@gnu.org> <4fecd5dd.AEQAQDR72NkAAAAAAAAAAAOzWv8AAAACwQwAAAAAAAW9WABZudnG@mailjet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:51715) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1dtfnq-0004tt-Ug for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 17 Sep 2017 16:04:36 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1dtfnl-00076M-Hc for guix-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 17 Sep 2017 16:04:30 -0400 In-Reply-To: <4fecd5dd.AEQAQDR72NkAAAAAAAAAAAOzWv8AAAACwQwAAAAAAAW9WABZudnG@mailjet.com> (Arun Isaac's message of "Thu, 14 Sep 2017 06:52:04 +0530") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Arun Isaac Cc: guix-devel Hi Arun, You=E2=80=99re raising good questions. :-) Arun Isaac skribis: > 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. We discussed this in the past, at a time when I was more leaning towards having maintainers like Debian does. At the time, Andy (I think) suggested that collaborative maintainership the way we do it might actually =E2=80=9Cwork better=E2=80=9D and scale bet= ter. In the meantime, there have been long discussions in Debian about whether package maintainers should be dropped. Some rightfully argued that maintainership gives a sense of =E2=80=9Cownership=E2=80=9D to the maintain= er(s), which, whether we want it or not, discourages others from contributing to the package. I=E2=80=99m really summarizing here (there were a couple of articles on LWN= ), but to me that=E2=80=99s a very good argument. I=E2=80=99d rather have a s= ense of shared responsibility that this. As for chaos, I don=E2=80=99t think it=E2=80=99s that bad. :-) As ng0 wro= te, there are de facto people who are more familiar with specific packages. They don=E2=80=99t have an official title, but they are the ones who=E2=80=99d r= eview changes to these packages and provide advice. It seems to work well so far. > 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. Currently the rule is to take any free software package that=E2=80=99s submitted, but that poses the challenges you=E2=80=99re talking about. So far, we=E2=80=99ve rarely had issues with unmaintained packages, I think= . We certainly have packages with zero to few users, but they haven=E2=80=99t ca= used us too much pain either. What is more scary is massive imports from external repos (CPAN, etc.). I think we cannot handle all of it, not with our =E2=80=9Cquality=E2=80=9D = guidelines and not with the pace at which these repos change. At the GHM, we were discussing that, probably, we=E2=80=99ll have to accept= for Guix to be a gateway to those repos (at least for the =E2=80=9Cnon-core=E2= =80=9D subsets of the repos). Concretely, one could do =E2=80=9Cguix package -i cpan!Foo:= :Bar=E2=80=9D and have the package DAG imported and built live. It=E2=80=99s either that= or people will use CPAN=E2=80=99s own tools to achieve this. Thoughts? Thanks, Ludo=E2=80=99.