72 hours are not enough for maintainers?

[Eric Hall]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 08:52:34AM -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> 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?
> 

	I agree - 72 hours is a decent window of time.  I just used
this for a few updates I wanted in, and for one of the changes I was
able to converse with the maintainer and got a "go ahead, I'm way too
busy right now" as well.
	I'd like to see an improvement in maintainer notification,
some way for trac to grok the maintainers of a port a ticket is filed
against and send them an email without having a human properly assign 
the ticket or fill in the CC: field.  I have no idea if there are even
hooks in trac to make that possible....


		-eric