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

[Brett Cannon]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 08:05, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

This is the interpretation I have always held and this is the reason
we should do this (don't wait, David, just make the list; people who
don't like it can just ignore it). If we can help people who do issue
triage by writing down knowledge that the rest of us have just
instilled over the years then it is a benefit.

-Brett