[repoman] Maintainer, Maintainee, Maintainere

[Essien Ita Essien]

I wanted to start up a discussion concerning package maintainance and TU 
workload.

 From #6 on the http://repoman.mattal.com/ website it says: Any trusted 
party may register as a maintainer for any package. Packages will 
usually have more than one maintainer.

I think that just because I upload a package to a repo, I shouldn't be 
labelled the Maintainer (but I should be responsible for seeing that it 
is being Maintained).

In the current model, when a contributor convinces a TU to upload it to 
community, it seems the contributors work finishes there, and the TU is 
now more or less FORCED to upload something that they may not be too 
keen on maintaining. Ramp the numbers on this, and its very easy for a 
TU to be actually excepted to Maintain much more than they're able to.

What I think should happen is this: The contributor of a package will be 
its Maintainer. The TU will just be an upload and Quality control 
channel. Bug reports will be sent _directly_ to the 
Contributor/Maintainer of the package, while the TU just makes sure that 
there are no errors in the package etc.

If a TU sees a package going unmaintaineed, they can (and should) 
contact the real maintainer and threaten to remove their unmaintained 
packages from the repo if they don't shape up. This should allow the TUs 
to only actually maintain what they actually WANT to maintain, but only 
act like a supervisor on other things that they upload but are 
maintained by other ppl.

The new repoman system will allow this kind of maintainance model to be 
EASILY acheived.

thoughts?

Essien