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

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le mardi 15 septembre 2009 à 19:42 -0700, Raymond Hettinger a écrit : 
> > That would be a third source of info about who maintains what.
> 
> Is this just a formalization of what we already do now?

I cannot speak for David, but IMHO it should be a bit more than that.

The underlying idea is to promote a broader (and therefore less
exclusive) view of maintenership. We should extend the meaning of
"maintainer" (or "expert" as also stated) to people who are 1) competent
enough to give useful advice on (bug/feature) requests concerning a
module and 2) at least moderately willing to do so; this rather than the
supposed "owner" of a module, which is a notion we should discourage.

Therefore, we can promote collective appropriation of code, to avoid the
kind of deadlocks / gradual obsolescence we sometimes have with some
specific pieces of code for which nobody wants to take responsibility
without receiving an imprimatur from the "owner".

But of course MISC/maintainers.txt is /already/ useful as just a
centralized piece of information.

Regards

Antoine.