Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] the role of maintainers

From: Anton Khirnov <anton@khirnov.net>
To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>
Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] the role of maintainers
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:37:17 +0200
Message-ID: <168000343774.27013.7248555421089758280@lain.khirnov.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230325001445.GQ375355@pb2>

Quoting Michael Niedermayer (2023-03-25 01:14:45)
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 03:29:18PM +0100, Anton Khirnov wrote:
> > Hi,
> > during the recent discussion on git repo push rights vs maintainership
> > there was some disagreement on what does (or should) it mean to be a
> > maintainer of a piece of code. It seems that different people have very
> > different ideas on this, so I think it would be good to reach some kind
> > of consensus.
> > 
> > I propose that people submit their opinions on what the rights and
> > responsibilities of a maintainer should be to this thread, so their
> > relative merits can be discussed.
> > The we have a GA vote, and write down the result in the dev rules.
> > 
> > To start, some of the specific questions that I believe should be
> > considered are:
> > 1. Should the concept of maintainership exist at all? Does it serve a
> >    useful purpose? If so, what is it?
> > (further questions assume that the answer to 1. is yes)
> 
> Ultimately someone does fix issues, improve some code and takes some
> responsibility related to that code, aka "caring about it"
> 
> If noone does that, well ok, you have no maintainer. OTOH if someone
> does these things, thats what i would call a maintainer. The term
> "maintainer" is juat a label for that. 
> The same way a software developer is a label for someone creating
> software. Thats at least the way i see it.

The question is whether we benefit from this being a formal role. You
can just as well fix issues and improve code without being called the
maintainer.

And it seems to me that your "just a label" claim is not consistent with
the rest of your reply, where you say that maintainer automatically gets
certain privileges, such as git push access.

IMO these roles should be decoupled, because someone who authored a
specific module (like a filter or decoder) might still not know how his
code interacts with the rest of the project.

-- 
Anton Khirnov
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