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

From: Andreas Enge <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2023 11:36:51 +0100

Hello,

Am Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 09:53:29AM +0800 schrieb 宋文武:
> I usually push patches for others who don't have commit access, while
> most packages don't have a team at all, and some with me as the only
> team member.
> Should I wait for another commiter's approvol under this new policy or
> can I push "random packages" (eg: jwm) solo under the status quo?  For
> packages I as the only team member (eg: fcitx), should I looking for
> another commiter for other's patches and my patches?

under the current policy, what you do is fine and very welcome. Under the
new policy, it would not be (if I remember correctly, there is a one week
waiting policy, after which one could push nevertheless).

So while the idea is good in principle, I think we would have to make sure
that first:
1) Every current and potential new package is covered by a team.
2) Every team has at least 3 members, better yet 4 or 5.
   3 members would make it possible that even if one of them is on vacation
   or otherwise busy a patch could be pushed without this additional one
   week if the other 2 agree.

And I also think we then need 3) more tooling; maybe a mailing list for each
team? A file that contains the link between source code files and teams,
and a script around "git send-email" that automatically puts into cc the
corresponding team when submitting a patch? And the feature branches with
QA on cuirass or the Guix Build Coordinator that we talked about at the
Guix Days.

I think our main problem right now is lack of committers and/or contributors.
While looking at core-updates, I was surprised how outdated some of our
packages are (around Qt, KDE and Python, for instance; I suppose it depends
a lot on the field), in particular for a rolling release distro. (For Qt@5,
we were at a release from June 2022, and there had been more recent
releases in September, October and January; it would be nice to have a
working team preparing a feature branch in a timely fashion after each
release.)

There are currently 48 committers, and not all of them are active.
I think this is just not enough for 20000 packages.

Andreas