On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 10:49 PM, Daniel Campbell <z...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 12/20/2016 06:33 PM, Rich Freeman wrote: >> We don't have some >> committee on high pick a winner and tell all the maintainers that they >> all have to move from supporting x to supporting y. > > Fair points across the board but this stood out to me. We *do* have > groups that, on some subset of the tree, exert what they feel to be > winners. QA, the KDE team, and GNOME team have all made formal > recommendations or requirements that they expect to see in ebuilds going > forward. QA is blessed by council of course, so they have a bit more > sway. But we're lying if we say we don't have committees making > decisions on packaging guidelines. > > That's not the same as choosing a single package and telling every one > to scram, but we're not hands-off, either. >
Anybody wishing to add stuff to the main repository does not get a choice in following QA policy (though these matters can be appealed to the Council). However, their policies for the most part are fairly sensible and concern stuff like listing things as a dependency if you link to them and so on. KDE and GNOME developers work as a team, but these teams do not have any exclusive control over anything in the tree. If a Gentoo developer doesn't like what they've done with kmail they can add a kmail2 or kmail-rich0 or whatever that works they way they want it to. Heck, if a bunch of devs wanted to do their own thing they could start a kde-improved team if they wanted to. In general this doesn't happen, because the developers interested in maintaining these packages tend to agree on how they want to maintain them, or at least they don't care enough to bother with forking them. How do you think we ended up with eudev? -- Rich
