Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: change to default policy of doing changes to packages that are maintained by other developers

[Kent Fredric <kentnl@gentoo.org>]

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On Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:58:51 -0700
Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I'm not sure what this is in reference to so it seems to be a
> non-sequitur, but I like the policy of at least waiting a day for
> review of non-critical fixes. Phrased another way, let people in every
> timezone have a chance.

Its not aimed so much at the person writing this proposal, but more so,
something that has happened before and was annoying and I had to have
annoying conversations about why this was not-ok, where the agent in
question didn't attempt to reach out to any team member of a very
critical package before "just doing it".

The nature of the change *was* simple enough that had we seen it, we'd
have ACKed it easily.

But the need to get lucky and spot the commit in the history and review
it after-the-fact hoping the agent didn't break anything is where this
is "not-ok".

Yes, I hate to have to re-iterate in policy behaviour that I consider
to be a sensible reasonable default... but it turns out, not everyone
has that same sensibility.

I'm fine with a policy that allows for non-maintainer contributions,
just the stipulations of "try contact the maintainer, wait a reasonable
amount of time based on the overall combination of that packages
importance and the effective availability of people who maintain it to
even respond to a ping".

Because the fact is, non-maintainers have substantially less
understanding of the total net of complexities, both in portage and
outside of portage (by way of project specific tracking projects), and
they're less equipped to make a judgement call as to wether or not a
change that looks trivial, is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

( For instance, tweaking the package-keywords entries on bulk keyword
request I filed riles me up, because I need a lot of tooling to
maintain that stuff, and currently, other people tweaking stuff that is
outside their responsibilities messes with my ability to do this
effectively. And this isn't even visible 'in portage', its just more of
the same pattern of 'touching stuff that's not your responsibility to
touch without contacting the people whos responsibility it is' )


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