On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 08:52:34AM -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
I think this really begins to stretch the notion of "maintainer". He wants a week, you want two weeks, some other maintainers will probably say they want a month, before long you have a lot of ports being held hostage behind long-lived locks for no reason other than the fact that people want the ability to claim sole maintainership of ports AND take long vacations.
I'm not saying that volunteers should not be allowed to take a few weeks off when they want to - they're volunteers and should be able to take any amount of time off - I'm saying that taking time off and having hard locks in the ports collection are not concepts that work well in combination. Any successful project either has a dedicated team of volunteers checking their queues at least 2 or 3 times a week with hard locks, or it has more relaxed volunteers and soft locks that time out relatively quickly. We have subversion, changes can always be reviewed and backed out if necessary, and it's far better to err on the side of not frustrating people who want to contribute. This lesson has been learned repeatedly in other open source projects.
I think 72 hours is a very reasonable time out period. If you're that attached to your ports, chances are very good that you'll be checking your trac queue more often than this anyway, and if you're not that attached to them, then why be concerned if someone else makes changes?
I agree - 72 hours is a decent window of time. I just used this for a few updates I wanted in, and for one of the changes I was able to converse with the maintainer and got a "go ahead, I'm way too busy right now" as well. I'd like to see an improvement in maintainer notification, some way for trac to grok the maintainers of a port a ticket is filed against and send them an email without having a human properly assign the ticket or fill in the CC: field. I have no idea if there are even hooks in trac to make that possible.... -eric