[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Oliver Charles]

Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> writes:

> * If a package is unmaintained, it can be removed with minimal notice.
>   This will require some time under the new idea of maintainership
>   before it can be fairly put into place, but Eelco had the suggestion
>   that no maintainers could be treated equivalently to meta.broken =
>   true.

In Debian, I would imagine they can make use of the popularity contest
or whatever it is to see if people are even using this. Is it worth that
we consider having the ability to gather metrics like that? Removing
things from our package database should be more conscious than "is this
supported" and should really be considering "do people need this?".

> * Maintainers should respond to emails, issues, and pull requests about
>   their package in a timely fashion (even if just with WONTFIX)
> * Maintainers should at a minimum keep track of security updates for
>   their packages
> * If a change elsewhere breaks a maintained package in a non-obvious
>   way, the maintainers should make a reasonable effort to fix the
>   breakage in a timely fashion
> * Ideally maintainers would test their maintained packages on the
>   release branch(es) and master with regular frequency (most ideally by
>   using them as a user)
> * In most cases, maintainers should keep track of all new releases and
>   update when available. In the case where a particular maintainer only
>   wants to care about a specific version and that version is currently
>   the latest, it would be appreciated if they could let the community
>   know when a newer version is available so that someone else can step
>   up
> * We should devise a way of denoting maintainers for NixOS modules and
>   adopt similar policies there. Absent that, it would be nice if
>   maintainers for a package also took care of the modules for that
>   package where applicable
>
> Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
> some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
> want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.

These all sound reasonable - and I think I manage to do most of these
myself. Most of the packages I'm a maintainer for are packages I
actively use and am interested in the development of, so I am OK with
having to keep things up to date. So yes, I agree with all of these
points.

- ocharles