[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Shea Levy]

Hi all,

Currently, the semantics of the maintainers meta field are:

* Maintainers get an email when the build changes on hydra
* If making a large change to a package, it might be nice to run it by a
  maintainer first
* Maintainers are more likely than the average contributor to update the
  package
* When making a large change that breaks a maintained package (e.g.
  updating stdenv), the author of the change should go to a maintainer
  if the fix isn't obvious (though they may not be able to depend on the
  maintianer being able to help)

While this is a decent start, I think we should expect more of
maintainers in order to make and keep nixpkgs a high quality repository.
I don't think we need any formal policy, but I propose that we try to
make the following expectations with respect to maintainership:

* If a package is unmaintained, it can be removed with minimal notice.
  This will require some time under the new idea of maintainership
  before it can be fairly put into place, but Eelco had the suggestion
  that no maintainers could be treated equivalently to meta.broken =
  true.
* Maintainers should respond to emails, issues, and pull requests about
  their package in a timely fashion (even if just with WONTFIX)
* Maintainers should at a minimum keep track of security updates for
  their packages
* If a change elsewhere breaks a maintained package in a non-obvious
  way, the maintainers should make a reasonable effort to fix the
  breakage in a timely fashion
* Ideally maintainers would test their maintained packages on the
  release branch(es) and master with regular frequency (most ideally by
  using them as a user)
* In most cases, maintainers should keep track of all new releases and
  update when available. In the case where a particular maintainer only
  wants to care about a specific version and that version is currently
  the latest, it would be appreciated if they could let the community
  know when a newer version is available so that someone else can step
  up
* We should devise a way of denoting maintainers for NixOS modules and
  adopt similar policies there. Absent that, it would be nice if
  maintainers for a package also took care of the modules for that
  package where applicable

Thoughts? If we did decide this was a good idea, we should set aside
some time period by which people should unmaintain packages they don't
want this responsibility for and adopt packages they do.

Cheers,
Shea