[Rock-dev] Who are the package maintainers?

[Sylvain Joyeux]

Great point, Jakob !

Maintainers are identified by the <maintainer></maintainer> field in
manifest.xml. I honestly don't know if that particular bit was
discussed, it is just what seemed logical (at least for me, as usual
YMMV :P), and it is what ROS is using.

The email(s) I was planning to send deal with the unassigned
maintainers by telling the recipients that they should decide who is
the package's maintainer and update the manifest.xml. We're adults,
people should not arbitrarily assign themselves if they feel they're
not a package's main maintainer.

The recipients, in case there is no declared maintainer, are:
 1. taken from the <author></author> tags if there was no maintainers tag
 2. and fallback to the 50 last commits in the git commit history if
there was no author tag

Mails are sent by groups of people, meaning that in the case of 2.,
all affected people are going to receive a COMMON email, which allows
them to discuss the assignation of a maintainer more easily.

In addition, I thought about adding a rock_maintainer tag for the
packages that are not developed within the Rock infrastructure, as the
"go-to" person for that package's integration.

What I don't like about the spreadsheet thing is that (1) I really
don't want to auto-edit manifest.xml (it loses formatting and
comments) and (2) nobody will want to be tasked with editing
manifest.xml one by one. So ... I thought that distributing the work
is not error-prone but would at least be less painful.

Sylvain

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Jakob Schwendner
<jakob.schwendner at dfki.de> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> appologies if this was already discussed, but how do we identify who is a
> package maintainer?
> The original author? What about external packages, that are just
> "maintained"? Should we add a maintainer element in the manifest to make it
> superclear?
> Also, sylvain, it appeared you had created a script to extract the
> maintainers. Maybe you could send around the result, and we can start
> assigning maintainership somehow (google docs spreadsheet?)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jakob
>
>
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