Modules and Maintainers

[Allen Winter]

On Tuesday 18 December 2007 06:20:19 Sebastian Kuegler wrote:
> On Wednesday 12 December 2007 22:04:20 Allen Winter wrote:
> > For 4.x, where x >=1, I think we need to require maintainers for all our
> > modules.
> 
> While having a maintainer for a module or an application, I don't think it's 
> realistic to *require* modules that have no maintainer. What would we do with 
> modules that don't have a maintainer? We cannot simply remove those ... 
> 
We can 
  1) move active apps into another module with a maintainer
  2) move active apps into extra gear
  3) remove inactive apps

> On the other hand, having a maintainer doesn't guarantee that everything is 
> peachy.
There are no guarantees.

> I'm all for trying to sucker people into becoming maintainer, or at 
> least show more responsibility towards the release process, but it's nothing 
> we can put in terms of 'hard requirements'.
>
I consider this part of our maturing process.
At this point we are getting too large and too diverse.

> 
> > And, I think we need to consider consolidating some modules out of
> > existence. We might consider merging kdeutils, kdeaccessibility and kdetoys
> > for example back into the larger modules or into extragear.
> 
> Having bigger modules on the one hand decreases the amount of coordination, 
> but it can also make it harder to find someone to act as module maintainer.
> 
True.  But it also helps build a community, encourages more code-reuse,
and all that good stuff.

> > If we had a kdesdk maintainer this person would have been more aware
> > of the kompare issue and hopefully would have handled it better than I.
> 
> Yup, having maintainers, or at least people that feel responsible for a 
> certain part is something that helps the release-team making quality 
> releases.
> 
> > And there are still apps that haven't been ported, with their code laying
> > around in trunk.  We should have a list of each application with its
> > maintainer.
> 
> It'd be interesting how many more of those 'borderline' apps we have lying 
> around, I didn't really keep track of that ...
> 
> > Anyway... something to think about for the near future.
> 
> Yes, thanks for bringing it up. As a first step, we should communicate clearly 
> those 'orphaned' modules, and maybe point at people we deem good candidates 
> for maintainership.

Yes.  kdesdk is tops on my list of modules in need of a maintainer.