On 2/10/06, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In short: We are volunteers, and if volunteers want to do something, you > shouldn't prevent them from doing it - You should make it as easy as > possible, otherwise they will feel peed. Volunteer fire fighers don't get to do whatever they want.. Volunteers for the special olympics don't get to do whatever they want. Many examples of volunteers in the brick and mortar world have a code of conduct and lay out a set of responsibilities and obligations associated with the volunteer work which volunteers agree to comply with, partly to discourage lackluster and irresponsible volunteers from participating and detracting from the overall effort. Its not unreasonable to discuss the responsibilities and expectations on volunteer packagers in the context of the overall goals. > Example: I don't have a problem in continuing maintenance of some > packages for FE3 for some time, until _I_ am loosing interest, but I am > not interested putting the burdon a legacy project would additionally > impose on me. I think its quite fair to ask all maintainers to pledge to maintainership for a package on the timescales of specific releases to be honest about what their commitment is to the project... upfront. If a maintainer is only interested in maintaining a package in Extras for the latest Core release..we should know that.. upfront... so other people in the project can prepare to take over maintainership at the appropriate time. And I don't think its in this project's best interest to encourage packagers show up, build a package, and then lose interest in that package within a month and orphan it. I think there should be accountability for atleast a release for ALL packages from ALL maintainers, and if a maintainer has personal issues which makes it impossible to meet the expectation for maintainence for atleast one standard Core release.. then perhaps that packager shouldn't be volunteering for this project. And I don't think its in the project's best interest to encourage maintainers to lose interest part way through fc3's "legacy" process. I think we should be asking maintainers to be explicit about the timescales over which they are willing to make the effort over defined chunks of time and holding them to those estimates. Its going to save us lots of effort down the road scrambling to replace maintainers as they orphan packages willy-nilly. I think there should be clearly established points at which dropping maintainership for a package is encouraged so other people can plan their time to pick up maintainership of packages they are interested in and to discourage dropping maintainership between those time points. 6 month periods or something. Every six months or so, we do a general shout out to all maintainers and ask them to re-affirm if they are going to be maintaining their packages for the next 6 months. If they can't honestly commit to that, then other people can plan on taking over the co-maintainership of those packages to prevent a gap for any package. Its called planning. Many volunteer organizations have accountability mechanisms which rely on explicitly defined expectations as to how much work individual volunteers are pledging to do when they join the organization. There is no reason that a discussion about the expectation for volunteers in this project cannot happen. -jef -- fedora-extras-list mailing list fedora-extras-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
