Re: Adopt a patch!

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Arun,

You’re raising good questions.  :-)

Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> 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 “work better” and scale better.  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 “ownership” to the maintainer(s), which,
whether we want it or not, discourages others from contributing to the
package.

I’m really summarizing here (there were a couple of articles on LWN),
but to me that’s a very good argument.  I’d rather have a sense of
shared responsibility that this.

As for chaos, I don’t think it’s that bad.  :-)  As ng0 wrote, there are
de facto people who are more familiar with specific packages.  They
don’t have an official title, but they are the ones who’d review 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’s
submitted, but that poses the challenges you’re talking about.

So far, we’ve rarely had issues with unmaintained packages, I think.  We
certainly have packages with zero to few users, but they haven’t caused
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 “quality” guidelines
and not with the pace at which these repos change.

At the GHM, we were discussing that, probably, we’ll have to accept for
Guix to be a gateway to those repos (at least for the “non-core” subsets
of the repos).  Concretely, one could do “guix package -i cpan!Foo::Bar”
and have the package DAG imported and built live.  It’s either that or
people will use CPAN’s own tools to achieve this.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.