On Fri, Oct 04, 2024 at 05:22:27PM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: > There are two maintainership models I can think of: either a single > individual or a group of people would take over. > > - A single individual needs funding. The ideal situation would be if > that funding came independent of any of the large forges. Or > alternatively, the big players in this context come together to all > pay into the same pot to fund that person. In theory, the role could > be elected and serve for a limited amount of time so that overall, > the community is in control. > > - A group of individuals could take over, sharing the responsibility. > There would be a ton of different questions in this context: how to > form the group, how to balance its interests, how to distribute the > work across its members, how to resolve disputes, etc. I do think there is a need to have a single individual who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the patches are reviewed and merged in a timely fashion, that releases are cut on time and are high-quality, etc. But I also think that the project benefits from having trusted individuals who are knowledgeable about specific areas of the codebase. The maintainer can lean and rely on those individuals to get a sanity check of whether or not some patches are good or not. For instance, I would imagine that Junio relies on you to help review patches in the reftable implementation. I think that's more or less the status-quo, and IMHO it works well from a contributor's perspective. I would be curious if the maintainer feels the same or not ;-). I know that we have discussed in the past a more formalized version of the above where individual sub-systems maintainers are listed in a MAINTAINERS file with specific roles and responsibilities. I don't think the project is large enough or has enough active participants to warrant that formal of a process, but perhaps I am in the minority here. Thanks, Taylor
