On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 03:46:05PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > 3. Abolish maintainership entirely.
This is the obviously right solution. Everything else would be a temporary work-around to inefficiencies and bugs introduced by the existence of explicit maintainership. With explicit maintainership Debian is ignoring well-known software engineering best practices, and most notably the fact that "strong code ownership" is bad and invariably gets in the way of effective collaborative development. We should go for "weak code ownership" instead, which *in theory* is what we already have (given every DD can NMU any package), but the *culture* of strong ownership is so rooted in the project that people are still too afraid of using it. Also, we don't have good tools[^] that make it trivial to integrate back changes that have been NMUed by others; again, getting in the way of efficient collaboration. I'm personally convinced that a strong, symbolic act is needed to actually make weak code ownership a reality in Debian. Abolishing the Maintainer field all together[*] might be it. Revolutionary yours, Cheers. [^] well, we have dgit, but AFAICT is not really popular yet [*] together with making sure that any DD can commit to any public repo on alioth -- Stefano Zacchiroli . z...@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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