maintenance coverage

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 20 May 2007, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> hi,
>
> the basic idea is to gather some information about how well particular
> parts of kde are maintained. the primary goal would be to give hints
> where help - or in the worst case a new maintainer - is needed.
>
> the primary tool would be bugzilla, obviously.
> based on how long reports for a component stay in particular states,
> "activity percentiles" for "maintenance" (bugs) and "development"
> (wishes) could be calculated. additionally, if many reports are dealt
> with by somebody else than the registered maintainer, a "de-facto
> maintainer hint" could be issued (yes, i'm aware that mailing lists and
> dedicated bug triagers have to be taken into account).
>
> in a next step, svn directories could be mapped to bugzilla components.
> potential benefits would be more accurate statistics - taking into
> account the actual size of the component and non-bugzilla activity.
> additionally, the MAINTAINERS files would be obsoleted by this more
> formal structure which hopefully would be easier to keep up to date with
> the help of automated hints.

the assumption here is that maintenance is correlatable to things like commit 
activity. while it's certainly true that absence should throw up flags and 
that many projects do indeed have the maintainer as a primary committer, bug 
triager, etc... it's also very true that the larger projects have several 
active individuals who aren't the maintainer; in fact, in many large projects 
(in and out of kde) there are those who spend a good amount of their time and 
effort on things like patch review, organization and coordination, etc... 
it'll be interesting to see what these stats come up with, though i expect it 
to be better at detecting problems than health =)

cool idea though ... is this something you are actively working on?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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