[arch-dev-public] Repo Distinctions

[Paul Mattal]

Damir Perisa wrote:
> Wednesday 17 October 2007, Aaron Griffin wrote:
>  | This is definitely an interesting proposal. See, what we have here
>  | is two clear camps that define [extra] different ways - packages
>  | developers maintain, or packages the distro needs.
>  
> they are not really that cleanly separated camps.

In fact, the thing to note is that they aren't really camps or people
taking sides.. it's just about the reality of free agents working in a
free system scratching their own itches. We want to capitalize on all
the itch-scratching going on so it can benefit us all! If a developer
needs to maintain a package, and he can't do so in any repo we provide,
he'll have to go do it in private.. and the community suffers from not
being able to benefit as effectively from his creative energy.

Instead, we should give him a repo where he can maintain any package he
wants for as long as he wants, and require him to clean up after himself
and hand the package off or demote it to unsupported when he's had
enough of it.

Right now, for instance, I maintain about 30 packages in a private repo
for this very reason.. I was not ready to commit Arch long-term,
short-term, or otherwise to have to deal with these packages.

If we made it clear that long-term commitment was specifically not
guaranteed by extra, and created a clear path for passing packages off
to others when devs are no longer interested in maintaining them, it
would really encourage more developers to share all the quality work
they're doing.

- P

P.S. Note also that the orphaning problem will be helped immensely by
multiple maintainers. If there are 3 developers registered as
maintainers on a package, it is much less likely that all three will
suddenly drop it in disinterest. Once we get this in place, we should
encourage keeping a minimum of 2 maintainers for each package in [core].