An introduction of the new cheerleader...

[Paul Heinlein]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> There must be developers and package maintainers [other than ESR]
> with precize ideas on how they would like to contribute packages.

I would think that for packages that fall outside Core, there would be
two tracks:

1. Upstream developers who want to maintain packages for their own
   software (e.g, esr),

2. Interested third parties who want to maintain packages for someone
   else's software.

Presumably, we'd like to see as many packages as possible fall into
the first category.

Realistically, of course, third parties will continue to maintain
packages for a variety of reasons: the upstream developers aren't
interested in maintaining an rpm and/or the administrative files
associated with it (init scripts, logrotate entries, sysconfig files,
etc.) or the software is written for a different platform and requires
significant porting.

If the upstream developers are willing and (seemingly) able to
maintain a package, it seems to me they ought to get the first nod. My
hunch here is that bugfixes will get to them sooner than to anyone
else, and they'll have contacts with people already running their
software on a variety of platforms. This is just a hunch, however, and
I'm certainly willing to stand corrected.

For interested third-party maintainers, however, things grow murky,
and my thoughts aren't clear.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>