Gents & ladies,
While summarizing the dev forum last friday, I noticed that there are quite a number of old, unresolved bugs in bugtracker. Also, Jades excellent new packagelist (https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/packages/ - should be linked from the frontpage BTW) shows a blatant lack of packagemaintainers. Somehow I feel those two issues are related.
In order to achieve a higher quality standard then we already have I would propose the following.
* Every package needs a maintainer to be fully supported as part of OACS
* Orphan packages are clearly labelled as such (perhaps we should split Jade's list in two) and you cannot file bugs against orphan packages. Unless you're willing to become the maintainer.
Perhaps we can even go as far as not including orphaned packages in the releases. If you really need the package - become the maintainer. After all, a free lunch does not exist.
To lower the hurdle to become a pkg maintainer we should clearly define what it means, and put not too much weight on them.
A pkg maintainer does imo not have to write all (or perhaps even any) code himself or fix each and every bug. I figure someone in this role as more of a gatekeeper, with basically three tasks:
* keeping track of the developments wrt to package and making sure that any drastic changes have the necessary support from the community
* keep a close eye on the buglist of the package, in relation to this we should perhaps set more strict guidelines for bug classification (a critical/urgent bug cannot be open for 8 months, without getting attention, and still be urgent. It's either already resolved, or not really urgent)
* make sure the package gets tagged in time for new releases.
To get an idea wrt to the lingering bugs I mentioned, the following is a list of CRITICAL bugs open for 1mo or longer (12 of which are even prioritized as URGENT).
ACS Authentication, #844 - Lars Pind
ACS Kernel, #1761 - Don Baccus
Webmail, #1415 - unmaintained, bug reported by Joel Aufrecht
Chat, #1442 - unmaintained, bug reported by Joel Aufrecht
Jabber, #1443 - unmaintained, bug reported by Joel Aufrecht
Mailing list manager, #1444 - unmaintained, bug reported by Joel Aufrecht
Classified ads, #1581 - unmaintained, bug reported by Ben Koot
Photo album, #1599 - unmaintaind, bug reported by Hazi Gharagozlou
Edit This page, #1601 - unmaintained bug reported by Hazi Gharagozlou
ACS LDAP, #1632 - unmaintained & deprecated, bug reported by Matthias Bauch
Bugtracker, #1748 - Lars Pind, assigned to Joel Aufrecht
Forums, #1843 - unmaintained, bug reported by Deirdre Kane
2-dotLRN general, #1878 - ??, bug reported by Mohan Pakkurti
Openacs general, #1881 - ??, bug reported by Samer Abukhait
Logger, #1885 - unmaintained, bug reported by Richard Hamilton assigned to Peter Marklund
dotLRN syllabus, #1965 - ??, bug reported by Deirdre Kane
IMS Enterprise, #2020 - not in maintainer list, bug by Jeff Davis
ACS language, #2027 - Peter Marklund
File Storage, #2082 - Jeroen van Dongen, as of recently -currently still assigned to Don, (Don, if you re-assign it, I'll fix it & close the bug.)
Rgds,
Jeroen