Hi all, Currently, the semantics of the maintainers meta field are:
* Maintainers get an email when the build changes on hydra * If making a large change to a package, it might be nice to run it by a maintainer first * Maintainers are more likely than the average contributor to update the package * When making a large change that breaks a maintained package (e.g. updating stdenv), the author of the change should go to a maintainer if the fix isn't obvious (though they may not be able to depend on the maintianer being able to help) While this is a decent start, I think we should expect more of maintainers in order to make and keep nixpkgs a high quality repository. I don't think we need any formal policy, but I propose that we try to make the following expectations with respect to maintainership: * If a package is unmaintained, it can be removed with minimal notice. This will require some time under the new idea of maintainership before it can be fairly put into place, but Eelco had the suggestion that no maintainers could be treated equivalently to meta.broken = true. * Maintainers should respond to emails, issues, and pull requests about their package in a timely fashion (even if just with WONTFIX) * Maintainers should at a minimum keep track of security updates for their packages * If a change elsewhere breaks a maintained package in a non-obvious way, the maintainers should make a reasonable effort to fix the breakage in a timely fashion * Ideally maintainers would test their maintained packages on the release branch(es) and master with regular frequency (most ideally by using them as a user) * In most cases, maintainers should keep track of all new releases and update when available. In the case where a particular maintainer only wants to care about a specific version and that version is currently the latest, it would be appreciated if they could let the community know when a newer version is available so that someone else can step up * We should devise a way of denoting maintainers for NixOS modules and adopt similar policies there. Absent that, it would be nice if maintainers for a package also took care of the modules for that package where applicable Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do. Cheers, Shea _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev