[gentoo-proxy-maint] Proxy-maint situation and future

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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Hile, everyone.  Hile, team.

Let me start with some numbers.

Currently proxy-maint@g.o is present in 868 packages.  Of those,
652 (75%) are entirely proxy-maintained (the remaining one having
additional Gentoo developers or projects).

The proxy-maint project currently lists 14 developers.  Even if we did
consider all of them active (which would be an overstatement) that would
mean 62/46 packages per one proxy.  It's a fairly high number, but
realistically we can expect even twice as much.

Right now, there's 47 pull requests adding new packages open on GitHub
(some of them may add more than one package).  There's also 29 requests
regarding maintainer-needed packages, and at least some of them involve
taking the package over (and if they don't, we really ought to encourage
that).

All this considered, I'm starting to wonder what would be the best way
forward.  So far we're dealing with a strong tendency towards adding new
packages.  Furthermore, some of the recently added packages tend to
involve frequent version bumps.  While we certainly have many good
maintainers who are doing great job (and thankya big-big to them!),
I believe we're being overburdened.

My main concern is reaching a situation where we can't manage to timely
merge updates to packages already in proxy-maint, and I think we're
already close to that (if not suffering it already).  Therefore,
I believe we should prioritize on taking care of packages already
in proxy-maint over taking new packages in.

However, I'm not sure if this is sufficient.  It might be necessary to
introduce some restrictions on accepting new packages.  Possibly avoid
packages that look like very high maintenance burden.

What are your thoughts on this?  Do you have any specific ideas on how
we could improve the situation?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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