Thanks Sruthi for reply! (And I am sorry for the typo in your name) Marc Haber <[email protected]> writes:
> Adduser, on the other side, I would love to have team maintained. Are > you planning to fine me because I have failed to assemble a team > around adduser? Or what do you have in your mind to make people do > team work if a team fails to form? > > Will I get people assigned to help with adduser? Who is going to > manage those non-volunteers? > > Team maintainance is a good thing. But forcing or requiring it is not > going to work. Don't assume that there are people queuing up to > co-maintain packages. I share your reaction, but also: please don't assume poeple will NOT randomly appear if there is a team around packages. You don't necessarily need to do anything beyond changing the 'Maintainer:' field. I believe the rust/python/go/ruby/etc teams in Debian all prove, to some extent, that merely having a team around packages somehow leads to a dynamic that make people appear and contribute. I believe the lack of contribution to single-maintainer packages can be attributed (again: to some extent) to the fact the package is perceived to be "owned" by a single individual. I acknowledge that several teams have serious internal issues (for example, the Go team seems paralyzed to make any team-wide policy changes because there is no process in place for that, and people seems to veto changes without clear authority or offer any constructive path forward) but I still find the team-maintained packages in Debian to overall be more healthy than single-maintainer packages. I wish there was a 'Debian Developer Team' where all packages could be welcome to. I maintain some packages (e.g., cppi, git-merge-changelog, gnulib, git2cl, gnulib-l10n, xe) where team-maintainance would be higly appropriate and welcome, but I'm not aware of any existing team where the packages naturally belong. Maybe the situation is the same for 'adduser'? I don't fancy launching any new team, as my experience with small teams is poor and I try to reduce the number of teams (e.g., pkg-authentication, pkg-privacy, debian libidn team) rather than create more. I am happy with Sruthi's reply, and I hope as DPL she will lead discussion that will lead to some policy changes. /Simon
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