Hi all, I was wondering what other developers thought about introducing the concept of formal maintainers to Rockbox.
A lot of large open source projects seem to work this well - an example is the ffmpeg maintainers list here: http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/MAINTAINERS?view=co I see a maintainer for a particular part of Rockbox as someone who is capable of (and most importantly will make time to) investigating and fix bug reports related to that section of the code, and also to review patches (and commit them if and when the code is committable). The ffmpeg list is very long, and I see a list for Rockbox as being a similar size, if not longer. For example, each plugin would have a maintainer, as would each codec. The apps/ code would be split into many parts (menus, settings, playback, wps, database, playlists, etc), as would the firmware/ code. We may even want to have maintainers for each target supported by Rockbox (someone who uses that device every day and can soon spot newly introduced bugs or test new features). Informally, I think this already happens with many parts of Rockbox, but this is mainly where the original author of the code in question is still actively developing. The problem IMO is those parts of Rockbox where the original author(s) are not actively developing any more, or where the original author has lost interest in that part of the code. This code then becomes effectively unmaintained because no-one knows it well enough. This is why I think having a formal list of maintainers would be useful - so that we know which parts of Rockbox have active developers who are interested and movitated to work on them, and more importantly, which do not. Speaking personally, I would be happy to start working on parts of Rockbox that I'm not currently very familiar with, and would find a list of "unmaintained" parts of the code useful in deciding where spending my time would be most helpful to Rockbox in general. That's really all I'm suggesting - that we try and organise ourselves more efficiently. So instead of lots of people knowing a little about everything, we each try to become expert in something, and hence become more productive. What do people think? Is anyone apart from me willing to commit to maintaining certain parts of Rockbox? Or do people want to keep the current informal "everyone is responsible for everything" approach? Dave.
