[Sugar-devel] [Activity Team] Wiki guidance for adopting orphaned Activities / Activity co-maintainer

[Gary Martin]

Hi Gonzalo,

On 9 Apr 2012, at 05:07, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:

> IMHO, seven days is not enough time to take a decision.
> We can promise reply in seven days, and specially in the case of a new maintainer,
> help him to be involved.
> I am thinking in the case of Labyrinth, and trying to no repeat the same error.

I think Labyrinth and myself as maintainer/developer was the original vat of boiling oil this all started with. I strongly disagreed with the design and a patch a deployment was shouting for landing but didn't have the bandwidth to write/present my version, after a week or so of me not getting time to spend on it, I had received a bunch of impatient emails, at which point I'd had enough of the inbox hassle and other tasks needing work, so I just handed over maintainership to get them off my back.

Any way, yes I agree 7 days is not long enough for the complicated cases (e.g. deployment with potentially part time staff, or staff away on holiday), but in these cases (hopefully not too frequent) the Activity Team decision in that time can be 'no' while we further try to contact the maintainer for some given duration of time. We would just be acting as a cushion between potential forks (there is nothing stopping anyone form forking an Activity on day one and ignoring the existing maintainer), and hopefully have a little more history/knowledge with regard to an Activity and its maintainer vs. the new requestor.

The primary reason for this FAQ entry is that Bernie seemed to think it was an issue from his experience with a past deployment, we/he can now point people to the FAQ if this comes up again. Ideally the push towards co-maintainers means that someone else can make a call on landing (or not) a patch if the lead maintainer is out of contact for a while.

Regards,
--Gary

> Gonzalo
> 
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 1:05 PM, Gary C Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> This is a quick tentative shot a providing some FAQ guidance on the wiki for adopting orphaned Activities, or becoming an Activity co-maintainer. Nothing too dramatic or rocket-science but the conversation came up on IRC today with bernie and cjl so here it is:
> 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Team/FAQ#How_do_I_adopt_an_orphaned_Activity.2C_or_become_an_Activity_co-maintainer
> 
> Shout if you disagree! :)
> 
> Regards,
> --Gary
>