From Fedora Project Wiki

Collective Maintenance Of Packages

The Problem

There are several occasions where the individual maintainers are still active and working on some software packages while not fixing trivial bugs on other software packages. If this occurs over a long period of time, the maintainers should seek out co-maintainers or just be orphaning the software packages they are not interested in. If it does happen for a shorter periods, others can act as a buffer to avoid the problem lingering for our users. Other experienced and trusted package maintainers, developers or others in the community have offered a specific simple solution to the problem in terms of patches or recommendations that translate into straight forward solutions. Maintainers are wary of stepping on each other's toes and clear guidelines helps is setting expectations

The solution

When the situation described above happens, somebody (called the reporter) can proceed with what is explained below. However, this should only be done in one bug at a time for each maintainer, even if there are many such bugs for different or the same components. To enforce that, a blocker bug should be associated with the bug such that it is easy to see which maintainer is already concerned by the procedure.

The reporter put the following comment in the bug:

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As per the 'No answer to easy bug' policy, please answer within 2 weeks whether

  • you allow others to fix this bug
  • you are not interested enough in that package to really keep on maintaining it by yourself, and are looking for a co-maintainer or

to orphan the package

If you don't answer after 2 weeks and one remainder lasting also at least 2 week the package will be orphaned according to the policy stated at <link>

---

- The reporter blocks a blocker bug, such that before following the procedure another reporter can check that the packager hasn't have a similar procedure already begun.

- The blocker bug is left for at least 1 month, even if the maintainer answered, such that only one procedure per month can be engaged.


The idea is to avoid having people be able to bother maintainers more than needed by having only one procedure opened at a time, while forcing uninterested maintainers to orphan their packages.

References