Maintainership of KMail

[Don Sanders]

On Tuesday 03 December 2002 15:17, Dirk Mueller wrote:
> On Die, 03 Dez 2002, Don Sanders wrote:
> > > What is a Adopter ?
> >
> > In open source / free software an adopter is someone who adopts
> > an orphaned package. (See also Homesteading the Nooshere)
>
> Ok, explanation understood, but the real question was "why is it so
> important for being adopter and not maintainer?". 

I'll cover that below.

> Either you're
> willing to maintain the code (i.e. feel responsible for it, work on
> incoming bug reports, make sure the app is ready for releases), or
> you're just a "contributor", who makes things work but otherwise
> doesn't feel responsible for it.

I'm not sure I agree with this.

As I've said before I want to be able to take a break sometimes and 
stop contributing like tomorrow I go on a 3 day Christmas party, and 
then I go to Asia for a week the next day.

I also might want to work on a difficult problem that means I might be 
less active on the lists. Or maybe I have financial concerns and have 
to spend more time making money and less time contributing to KDE.

Now just because I've been less active for awhile that does not mean I 
no longer feel responsible.

I mean I would be pretty pissed off if someone had moved into my 
apartment and changed the locks when I got back from christmas 
holiday.

> In either case I don't see where "adopter" would fit into this
> picture.

Adoption is a legitimate way of becoming the maintainer of an app, I 
assert that is how I became the maintainer of KMail. I assert that 
the previous maintainer has abandoned KMail.

If someone else wants to take over maintainership of an app then they 
should discuss that first with the current maintainer. Or show that 
the current maintainer has abandoned the app. This is commonsense.

Sorry if this email is rushed, I'm very rushed right now.

Don.