72 hours are not enough for maintainers?

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

I think this really begins to stretch the notion of "maintainer".  He  
wants a week, you want two weeks, some other maintainers will probably  
say they want a month, before long you have a lot of ports being held  
hostage behind long-lived locks for no reason other than the fact that  
people want the ability to claim sole maintainership of ports AND take  
long vacations.

I'm not saying that volunteers should not be allowed to take a few  
weeks off when they want to - they're volunteers and should be able to  
take any amount of time off - I'm saying that taking time off and  
having hard locks in the ports collection are not concepts that work  
well in combination.  Any successful project either has a dedicated  
team of volunteers checking their queues at least 2 or 3 times a week  
with hard locks, or it has more relaxed volunteers and soft locks that  
time out relatively quickly.  We have subversion, changes can always  
be reviewed and backed out if necessary, and it's far better to err on  
the side of not frustrating people who want to contribute.  This  
lesson has been learned repeatedly in other open source projects.

I think 72 hours is a very reasonable time out period.  If you're that  
attached to your ports, chances are very good that you'll be checking  
your trac queue more often than this anyway, and if you're not that  
attached to them, then why be concerned if someone else makes changes?

- Jordan

On Feb 21, 2008, at 2:57 AM, Thomas Reifferscheid wrote:

> Me too. Sometimes I try to have some time with my family on  
> weekends, so
> maybe
> two weeks will be better.
>
> If "js" starts using a realname when writing emails, I'd probably  
> offer
> him maintainer rights,
> so he can help us fixing tickets.
>
> Kind regards
> Thomas
>
> Randall Wood wrote:
>> I would prefer a week, as I often may not get a chance to look at
>> anything in MacPorts except on weekends.
>
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