[sane-devel] [janitorial] project member list and maintenance status clean up

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Johannes,

Johannes Meixner writes:

> Hello,
>
> On Dec 18 19:01 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (excerpt):
>> What do you think?  Should I just go ahead and make it clear
>> that a *lot* of backends are unmaintained and leave it up to
>> project members to start maintaining the ones they care about?
>
> from my point of view an essential part of the ideas behind
> free software is openness and truthfulness.
>
> I.e. from my point of view go ahead and make it very clear
> and obvious for everybody what the actual state is.
>
> I think the worst thing that could happen is that someone
> may volunteer for an unmaintained backend.
> In contrast when actually unmaintained code is somehow
> listed as if it was maintained then someone who does
> not know the details may never think about to volunteer.

Thanks for your opinionated reply.  I share your opinion but want to see
if there are folks, project member or otherwise, that prefer the current
situation.  If I don't get any feedback, I think I'll just go ahead and
mark those 50 backends as unmaintained.

In the mean time, volunteers to maintain such backends are welcome!

>> Just because people wrote and/or changed a significant chunk
>> of a backend doesn't mean they intend to maintain it.
>
> I disagree to some extent:
> I think the one who wrote a piece of code should also maintain
> his piece of code - of course not forever - but at least for some
> reasonable time until it is clear that his piece of code is o.k.

Agreed.  My statement was triggered by looking at the list of backends
in the AUTHORS file and seeing some folks with git write access that may
just have helped out at some point and got listed there.  It wouldn't be
fair to make them maintainer just because of that.

# Just because I've been fixing up compiler warnings all over the place
# doesn't make me a maintainer for all those backends, does it?  I sure
# hope not ;-)

> FYI:
> I love things like "git log -p --follow" and "git blame -w -M"
> for correct assignment of guilt ;-)

Thanks for the tip.  Doing this for 90 backends though is an awful lot
of work ;-)  Maybe I should think about how this could be scripted ...
Then again, you'd really have to look at the commit messages to assign
"guilt" correctly.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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