[stdlib-sig] MISC/maintainers.txt anyone?

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le mardi 15 septembre 2009 à 18:38 -0400, R. David Murray a écrit :
> 
> Table (1) would list, I propose, three categories of people:
> (a) 'official maintainer(s)', (b) experts, and (c) contributors.

This is too complicated IMO.
(a) + (b) is very sufficient and perhaps still not simple enough.
I don't see any strong difference between maintainers and experts.
As for casual contributors, I don't see any point in an exhaustive
listing of them (which, depending on the module, may be very long and
tedious and maintain).

> An 'official maintainer' would be someone willing to take more-or-less
> full responsibility for a module (such as Jesse for Multiprocessing).

I don't think "full responsibility" is a good thing. See my other
message (at 00:52 CEST) for why I think so.

As a summary:

A maintainer is someone who has a reasonable authority over a piece of
code; it may be worth asking him for review or permission, but no core
developer should be *required* to do so. On the contrary, we must
encourage other people to be autonomous, learn the code, and be able to
make decisions on their own. This is the only way to avoid dead ends
like we nowadays have with several modules. It also discourages
possessive behaviours (wrt. feature set, coding style, etc.), which is
always a good thing.

Regards

Antoine.