[Nix-dev] Maintainership

[Michael Raskin]

>It is a trade-off. Broken packages can be more overhead than duplication
>of work. If you make a package that works for you, push it to nixpkgs
>and abandon it, the next person will find it broken for his purpose, fix
>it and in the process break it for you. You will both spend time
>debugging the package. If one of the two users was a maintainer, the
>other could come to him and they can figure out something that works for
>both. If there is no maintainer and you update once in a while, you can
>end up ping-ponging fixes and counterfixes.

Somehow, whenever updates of packages I care about were broken, it was 
a simple mistake that was easy to fix separately… I think this scenario 
is overly pessimistic.

In general, one can expect that the amount of time maintainers spend on
their packages will not change too much whatever policy change you
propose. There are some packages that I want to have installed but don't
care about versions, so the question is not whether I will maintain them
well but whether I will keep them in configurations/ or nixpkgs/.