[packman] Package update workflow?

[Cristian Morales Vega]

On 4 May 2012 16:48, Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser at opensuse.org> wrote:
> On 2012-05-04 15:58:33 (+0100), Cristian Morales Vega <reddwarf at opensuse.org> wrote:
> That's why a lot of packages don't really have much of a
> maintainer and why, instead, I'm jumping from one package to
> another like a fire fighter. If someone feels like wanting to
> own packages in Packman, be my guest, please do so ;)

A solution is to just lower the workload.
I think a problem is that nobody wants to drop packages. If we had
download statistics probably we would find packages with *zero*
downloads! Usually packages that have been abandoned upstream and are
therefore the ones that take more time to make them build in the
latest versions.

transcode is dead, let's accept it. And I see 11 packages that require
it. Either the dependencies are wrong or those packages should have
already started to move to something else. Those packages are usually
DVD related... we are in 2012!!! DVDs??? Who uses those any more?

There a few packages I just don't feel motivated to fix because I
don't think any user really cares. If you look at the Packman build
service the situation looks bad. But we don't have so many users
complaining here. Perhaps it's just that no user cares about those
packages any more.

And it could be argued that we could drop Evergreen and SLE targets
from Essentials to also lower the workload. But if interested people
can accept its current state I guess it's not such a problem.

>> So... there is no clear policy. And if you trust the
>> maintainer/bugowner tags in the package metadata it's easy to be
>> worried about stepping on the toes of somebody that isn't there.
>
> How do you mean?

Just that, that I don't know who disappeared and who is just in a two
weeks holiday. I don't do something expecting the maintainer to do it
(searching for some other package broken...) or send an email to
him... Just to find he is not there any more.
But more important. I somebody sees in the metadata that a package has
a maintainer (even if that maintainer is not available any more) he is
not going to offer himself to be the new maintainer.

Do you want new maintainers? Publish here a list of packages without
maintainer and interested people will appear. But... there is a list
of packages without a maintainer? Can it be created reliably at all?