[Kde-games-devel] release manager

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Martin Heni wrote:
> On Friday 16 March 2007 10:31, Johann Ollivier Lapeyre wrote:
> 
> You and Mauricio have my support.
> 
> I agree that it is a good idea if you both do it.
> 
> If the others also agree we should put your names and contact emails on the
> kdegames webpage too.

We were talking about this yesterday on IRC. Andreas Beckermann and 
others also joined us and gave us his input on maintainership issues.

I would not mind helping Johann if necessary, but I believe listing him 
alone as the "official" release manager for kdegames in KDE 4.0 will be 
more appropriate at this time, in order to give release managers in 
other modules a single point of contact, and make communication and 
coordination with them more efficient when the crunch time arrives. 
Internally we will continue to discuss module policies as a group of 
course, but giving Johann more freedom to decide the release specific 
issues alone will probably help in the long run, so he does not get 
burned too easily with the job :)

I also think that for now our IRC meetings are working great as a space 
where some of the tasks associated with the module maintainership can be 
discussed, so I would like to propose that we keep them going, in 
association with the mailing list. Yesterday over IRC Andreas mentioned 
that his issues with lack of time will unfortunately continue for the 
next months, and this is one more reason for us to continue our group 
effort and share some of the tasks previously associated with the module 
maintainer alone. As an example, Andreas mentioned the need for an 
overhaul of games.kde.org, which is something we have discussed 
previously, but have not reached a conclusion. With the approach of KDE4 
this issue is now gaining even more importance, so if one of you guys 
(or a team) wants to tackle it that would be very nice for the project imo.

IMO, if we split the tasks it will take more time for people to get 
tired of them. Stamina eventually runs out for everything... Andreas and 
Martin carried the module with minimal help for several years, so I 
imagine it should be difficult to keep the motivation to contribute 
after some time. And they are still here! It is great that we now have 
more people to help, so they can continue to contribute without 
overloading themselves with so many tasks as they did in the recent past.

To summarize, I think there are some tasks on our module that require 
some sort of "maintainer", other than the obvious one of maintaining 
each game. We are already tackling these issues in an organic form, but 
some formal organization does not hurt. For me, the tasks that are 
surfacing for KDE 4 are:

-Review team: something we agreed on back in November, a team that will 
review all games and recommend which will be in the package, and which 
will not make the cut. Albert, Pino, Johann and Stephan were nominated 
for this last November.

-Release manager: someone that helps with release related issues (status 
updates, communicating module decisions to other release managers and 
helping to get kdegames module ready for packaging.) Johann will fill 
this role for KDE 4.0. The facts that he is already part of the review 
team, and is not associated with any single game in particular make him 
a perfect candidate for this task imo.

-Web site maintainer - someone that can centralize the task of taking 
care of games.kde.org. We need one volunteer (or a team) to help with this.

Maybe there are more tasks that could benefit from having someone 
dedicated to it? As an example, I have self-appointed myself as "the one 
that tries to maintain the IRC meetings going"... :)

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini