Subject: [bug#61894] [PATCH RFC] Team approval for patches

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 12:52:02 +0100

Hello,

Am Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 10:26:18PM -0500 schrieb Maxim Cournoyer:
> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
> > I hope the maintainer team can help make teams “more functional”,
> > whatever that teams.  It’s really what maintainership is about in Guix;
> > it’s not about writing code.
> I'm happy to help with the effort, but I don't think it's particularly
> relevant to Guix co-maintainers more than anyone else interested in
> advancing/contributing to Guix, and I find it great that it's this way
> (not out of laziness, but because the talent pool of the whole Guix
> community is much larger that that of us 4 co-maintainers).  Per what we
> co-maintainers signed up for in [1], the co-maintainers three primary
> duties are:

but there is also
"Looking after people: making sure to promote people who are very involved
in leadership position; dubbing new committers, new maintainers, new
members of the spending committee. Supporting new initiatives. Generally
trying to make sure everyone’s happy. :-)"

As for all "management positions" (even if we may not like the term here
as it often evokes a hierarchy; maybe "board members of a non-profit"
captures the idea better), I think the maintainers' role is more about
moderating ("animer" in French, which I think is more to the point),
keeping the overview, overseeing and facilitating initiatives, making sure
the project moves on, etc., than day to day work on details, or the three
technical points you mention (and which probably hardly ever require
action).

Maybe it would be time to move on to something like the Debian Social
Contract and concrete rules how membership, commit rights, maintainer
roles in the Guix project are bestowed and what is expected from people
fulfilling such roles.

Andreas