Collective maintenance

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 01:36:40AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A friend of mine pinged me and asked about the status of this bug
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442921
>
> Just using this as an example here since it a simple one. This is  
> apparently just a simple missing dependency but hasn't been fixed in a  
> while. Just using this as a example, assuming that the maintainer is  
> busy, on vacation or something and cvsextras is open, many others could  
> fix this issue bypassing the primary maintainer for the moment but there  
> doesn't seem to be any policy on what kind of fixes can be collectively  
> done. 

There is a policy, here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Policy/WhoIsAllowedToModifyWhichPackages
But it doesn't cover the case you are seing, this is the typical 
'easyfix but maintainer is not responding'. 

> I remember seeing similar discussions before so this isn't a 
> isolated problem. 

Indeed. I keep asking people to do some guidelines, I think that it is
unfortunate, but it happens too often in fedora. I have easyfix or bugs
where I propose to do the work that are opened for months if not more,
if I was a casual user, I would find this unacceptable.

> can just go ahead and fix the problem noting the details in the commit  
> message instead of having to file a bug report?

I don't think this is right either. In my opinion cases where it is ok
to do something like that are rightly covered in the policy mentionned
above. I think that a specific policy is needed which would be more
similar with the missing in action policy, but for a particular easyfix
bug where somebody is ready to do the work, and not for a maintainer.
Some people proposed to escalate to FESCO such cases, but I think it is
much too common to use FESCo escalation for those cases.

--
Pat