Conflict solving and maintainer

[Sebastian Sauer]

On Monday 06 December 2010 17:18:05 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Monday 06 December 2010, Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> > In Amarok, all of our core developers (or "citizens") are basically a
> > team of maintainers. And we always try to resolve conflicts by
> > consensus. Only if that fails (very rarely), then we might do a
> > voting. That happens maybe once a year or so.
> 
> It depends a lot on the project and what you think the role of "maintainer"
> is. If it's the cerberus who keeps ugly code out, then we can do without.
> But in the current state, every koffice app needs someone who pulls,
> pushes, blogs, writes, evangelizes, talks to the press, helps newcomers,
> does janitorial stuff and keeps an overview of what's going on.

For the record; I did all that without ever being a maintainer of any 
koffice/calligra app. But I am maintainer of a dozend of KDE-applications 
where I did not commit anything for years...

We also have the case that we activly try to move code out of the applications 
to share them between different applications. That means that common code is 
shared between multiple maintainers what means we don't have one-single-
maintainer-to-rule-them-all policies there already. In fact during the last 
years that was a big advantage.

I guess it is very important to remove any special-rights someone believes he 
earns just cause he has a maintainer-role. This is just not the case. If you 
have special-rights then it's so cause all others grant them to you on a daily 
temporary base. The maintainer is not some kind of "dictator for live" or so 
cause that results in more problems then solutions or at least it has lot of 
conflict-potential.

Maintainer means that you identified a single person OR a group of person who 
should official be seen as "the guys who know answers to questions, can guide 
into the correct direction and maybe even moderate between interests" kind of 
introducer/helper/moderator.

I mean let's be serious; how mutch cases do you know where playing the 
maintainer-card was really needed and at how much cases it was providing more 
harm then solving problems? If you just look at KDE then the most respected 
core-developers are those who never ever played that card cause they know that 
there are better, easier and more promising ways. I see there a clear 
corelation between not playing that card and being respected. That in turn 
means as soon as you play that card you start to lose power rather then making 
your point. It's not that different from the atombomb except that noone gets 
rich.

So much for my short philosophical hike about maintainers. Sometimes I just 
cannot stop ;) What I like to say with that? Well, I agree with Mark that 
maintainers are not needed but I also don't have a problem with continuing 
using that role as long as it doesn't provide new problems (which I don't 
think it does with the current maintrainers-gang). Personally I like the 
citizen-list idea a lot cause it would 1) allow everybody to participate even 
if him/her doesn't have whatever special role and 2) it means majority decides 
what is way better then single-person-decisions in any aspect I can think of.

Let me add that I would see it was big fail if WMC/CWG is needed any longer. I 
am sure we can do much better now just like all other KDE sub-communities are 
already able to.