Conflict solving and maintainer

[C. Boemann]

On Tuesday 07 December 2010 21:49:19 Sebastian Sauer wrote:
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> calligra-devel mailing list
> calligra-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/calligra-devel
Sounds very wise. My main reason for wanting to be maintainer, a) Prevent 
any other person to become dictator b) Indicate that I take Words seriously. 
c) Offer my guidance to new and old devs.

I most certainly don't want to dictate much of anything, but I do think It's 
important to have these contact persons, on a per application level. Persons 
that have indicated that they are in it for the long run. Persons who other 
people respect as you say. And as Boudewijn says, "maintainer" is the 
traditional term for it.

Maybe we should just define what we a a project attach as the role of 
maintainer. so that no one ever can come in and abuse, any percieved 
rights

Casper