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

[Mark Dickinson]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 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.

+1 for this interpretation of maintainer.

And a big +1 for Misc/maintainers.txt, or equivalent information elsewhere
(a wiki page, perhaps).  I've frequently found myself wanting this
information when commenting on an issue (most recently for the
curses module:  the source says that AMK is the current maintainer,
but I don't know whether that information is still in date, and if not,
who else might be familiar enough to fix curses issues).  I've not been
around long enough to know the history of the various bits and pieces
of Python.

Mark