Lost maintainers

[Matthew Emmerton]

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Kirill Ponomarew wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 06:56:38AM +0300, Sergey Matveychuk wrote:
>
> > I think we need to make some procedure of taking off the maintainership
> > from "lost" maintainers. I mean maintainers who keep silence for a
> > long-long time.
> >
> > I know at least two such maintainers for www/squid and devel/boost ports.
> >
> > They block ports updates with their silence.
> >
> > We can give them back the maintainership if they will back.
>
> We're missing something like policy from portmgr@ imo,
> concerning this issue. If the maintainer is not able to handle
> his own PRs within 2-3 months, maintainership should be dropped
> to ports at FreeBSD.org. It's a hard approach, but in such case we
> can work with PRs more effective way.

IMHO, even 2-3 months is too long -- this is almost a complete release
cycle (considering that releases are every 3-4 months and the ports tree
is frozen for 2-4 weeks prior to release.)

This can cause important updates (features, version bumps, security fixes)
to miss two consecutive releases and users (especially those installing
from packages) get irked by this a lot.

I'm not suggesting that we drop maintainership after say 1 month, but I
think there should be some understanding between ports committers such
that good, well-formed patches from the user community be committed even
without maintainer's blessing, after a set period of maintainer
unresponsiveness.

Yes, I know, this goes against the reason for having maintainers in the
first place, but people do get busy sometimes (exams, moving, real work
pressures, etc.) so this type of policy would help avoid the problems that
started this discussion.

--
Matt Emmerton