Branko Čibej <brane@xbc.nu> writes:
> Indeed, this means that Subversion can no longer be the fun trip it's
> been until now; we'll have to institute the office of maintainership
> (and not just for bindings, either). On the other hand, that's not as
> horrible as it sounds: First of all, we knew (and at least I said a long
> time ago) that at a certain point, the project will become big enough to
> require official recognition of rank among the courtiers; you don't
> avoid this fact by splitting the kingdom into smaller bits. And second,
> we already _have_ unofficial maintainers for most of the modules in the
> code, so all we have to do is make the role official.
>
> Now before I hear too many outraged cries, let me explain that I'm not
> proposing to change the way we make decisions in this community. Module
> owners would be responsible for keeping the parts of the system they
> oversee in sync with the whole. That would not give them extra voting
> rights or similar, although I do expect that, by the nature of things,
> the module owners would be people whose opinions carry weight by virtue
> of their knowledge and experience. (The avant-garde of the working
> peoples, first among equals -- very apt for the Subversion project,
> don't you think? :-)
I'm not sure there's anything to gain by this.
The C code has never had an "official" maintainer who is more
responsible than the other committers. It stays in shape because
everyone feels responsible (and everyone polices everyone else :-) ).
That hasn't been the case for the bindings, but there is now a renewed
committment among all committers to make it easier to maintain the
bindings, so that situation is going to improve. (No, it's not going
to just improve magically, but we are going to take concrete steps to
make it improve.)
Our informal module ownership is working quite well right now, and I
doubt it would be improved by making it official. Clearly (say) Greg
Hudson has both more responsibility and more influence over (say)
ra_svn than other committers. Everyone knows this. Giving him an
official hat to wear wouldn't change anything, and since this is a
volunteer project, the official titles would only be as meaningful as
people's actions made them -- in which case, let's dispense with the
titles and go by the actions.
(Roles like "Patch Manager", "Release Manager" are different -- you
want to know that there's one person who's taking care of it, to avoid
miscoordination.)
-Karl
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Received on Fri Feb 27 17:42:42 2004