[Nix-dev] Keeping nixpkgs up to date

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 08/29/2014 10:04 AM, Vladimír Čunát wrote:
> On 08/27/2014 04:35 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
>> What do you think? I think something like this is inevitable with the
>> ever-growing number of packages and users or we end up with the
>> situation like we have today, with thousands of outdated packages
>> without maintainers or with inactive/busy maintainers listed.
> 
> I think the main problem is that the total amount of energy spent on 
> maintaining packages is low, and I don't see how the grouping will help it.
> 
> Also, the commitment of being maintainer of a group of packages seems 
> significantly larger than for a single package.  The change may rather 
> dissuade people from becoming a maintainer at all, as they may be only 
> interested in a few particular packages and not e.g. in all games we have.
> 
> 
> Vladimir
> 
> 
> 

Actually I think people are much more inclined to sit down and spend a
few minutes sometimes updating a package or two from their group rather
than putting their own name down specifically on a package and then
having the sole burden of updating it themselves. I also think it makes
people feel ‘I'm in a group of people doing similar so I can always seek
help from them’ as opposed to ‘I'm on my own to figure it out when this
breaks’.

In general it means that technically one is ‘in charge’ of more packages
per-person but it's much easier to try to recruit under the ‘come and
help out sometimes with these packages’ angle as opposed to ‘go and
become maintainer of those packages and they will be your responsibility’.

Even if that's not the case, this doesn't remove the existing system,
people are free to only put down their name on individual packages. I'm
simply aiming at more organisation. We really have a lot of packages
that need some entity to maintain them and it's easier to track a
handful of entities for activity than thousands of individual packages.

-- 
Mateusz K.