[fab] Re: "community maintainers working on core" dilemma

[Luke Macken]

Warren Togami wrote:
> The Core+Extras merge combined with the move to a distributed VCS 
> would allow something like this.
> [...]
> 4) Entire SIG's could own packages group.

I think this is an extremely important point.

Not only is it easier for new contributors to jump right into a smaller 
special interest group and start getting things done, but having more 
eyes on each problem is a Good Thing.  The benefits of having groups of 
contributors maintaining packages is really shown in projects like 
Gentoo (/me puts on his flame suit), where their "herds" collectively 
maintain groups of packages.  Ideally, this also helps reduce some of 
the weight that is put on the handful of devs who do the majority of 
sponsoring and mentoring of new developers, allowing each group to grow 
independent of one another.

I think we need something beyond just a web front end to a bunch of 
pre-existing tools which have been around before community development 
models.  We need the ability to allow a large community of developers to 
easily poke and prod at packages, while still retaining some level of QA 
sanity.  I would like to see a web based development framework where 
developers can view detailed information regarding each update for every 
package.  Pushing out an update would maybe require the approval of n 
core/SIG developers, who can comment on any patch or line of code.  
Testing the package could be as simple as selecting the patches you 
want, and clicking a button to get a customized SRPM.  Once approved, a 
button can kick the package off to the build system (and do all of the 
pushing/announcements/etc).  With this, we would get the metrics 
(package and developer), the collaboration, metadata, and the QA.

luke