Re: [gentoo-dev] Some ideas on how to reduce territoriality

[Marius Mauch <genone@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, 03 Aug 2007 15:49:58 -0700
Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Why should someone have to go through all of that just to make these
> minor fixes?  Is it really necessary for someone to be required to try
> to track down and contact the maintainer to tell them that they put
> "ebiuld" instead of "ebuild" into an ebuild?  This is my entire point.
> Why are we forcing a process that only fosters inefficiency?  It is
> much simpler to say "if you see one of these, fix it" than to force
> every single action to go through the maintainer.

Well, for simple typos it's ok. But some of the things you listed might
have a bigger impact: SRC_URI changes are ok when the actual files are
the same, but if they are somehow different one should really check wih
the maintainer to make sure it's still the correct file (same for
verifying checksums, unless it's obvious). In the end it comes down
that you have to know the consequences of a change, and assuming that
the maintainer knows more about a package than you do he should be
contacted for non-trivial changes (I'm not saying you have to wait for
him at all costs). Of course if a package is plain and
unconditionally broken it's ok to act first and talk later IMO, but
communication is a requirement, not something you should try to avoid.

One thing I completely disagree with however are the metadata.xml
changes. Basically you're saying there it's ok to change the maintainer
of a package without talking to the existing maintainer first (though
I'm sure that wasn't your intention).

Marius
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