More classes of maintainer (was: Re: branch master updated: nmap: fixes for 32-bit and pre-C++11 platforms)

[Eric Gallager]

On Wed, Nov 1, 2023 at 9:54 PM Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
>
> On 2/11/2023 12:32, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > As an aside, as it stands, the rules situation with closed maintainer /
> > open maintainer is kind of unpleasant already. For example, I'd like to
> > be able to indicate that I'm happy with anyone making reasonable changes
> > to my ports on their own without waiting three days for me, but there's
> > no way to do that, because "open maintainer" really means "three day
> > timeout" just like closed. It would be nice if we had some sort of
> > larger set of gradations for what people prefer, from "I handle all
> > commits on this, period" to "if you have commit access and want to help,
> > don't ask, just do it."
>
> A reasonable idea. I'd say that at some point you become less of a
> maintainer and more of an interested party, but a list of people who
> would just like to be Cc'd on the tickets and PRs for a port isn't a bad
> thing to have.
>
> We seem to have somewhat different experiences, as the reason I removed
> openmaintainer from some of my ports was that it seemed to be
> interpreted more like "commit whatever you want without asking." So
> being able to set expectations more clearly would be nice.
>
> > As another aside, we also have a ton of ghost maintainers who never
> > respond but whose name being on the port means you have to
> > ritualistically wait three days for a reply you know will never come.
>
> This is of course what the Port Abandoned procedure is for. Regrettably
> however, it also involves a three-day wait. :)
>

I think if we add a separate "interested party" role, it would
probably be good to change the abandonment procedure so that instead
of removing unresponsive maintainers entirely, they'd just get moved
to the "interested party" role instead. Sometimes reporting bugs
against nomaintainer ports can be pretty frustrating since no one
notices them since there's no one to cc, but with a separate
"interested party" field there could still be someone to cc. I guess
another way of thinking of it is separate maintainers for issues vs.
PRs? That is, "this person can help solve bugs with this port" vs.
"this person can make changes to this port" or something.

> - Josh