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Gentoo Proxy Maintaining Team

Content:

1.  Project Description

Gentoo currently has quite a few packages that lack a maintainer. To prevent treecleaners from removing those packages, a maintainer has to be found as soon as possible. The overall goal of this project is to act as a primary contact point between developers and users who want to maintain abandoned packages. Users are more than welcome to contact us and express their interest in maintaining a package assigned to 'maintainer-needed@gentoo.org'.

2.  Project Goals

To enhance the user-developer cooperation in maintaining packages.

3.  Developers

Developer Nickname Role
Markos Chandras hwoarang Lead
Maxim Koltsov maksbotan Member
Sergey Popov pinkbyte Member
Alexander Vershilov qnikst Member
Aaron Swenson titanofold Member
Michael Weber xmw Member
Ben de Groot yngwin Member

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

4.  Contact

The Proxy Maintainer project is available at proxy-maint@gentoo.org

5.  How do I know which packages are orphaned?

Treecleaners maintain an up-to-date list of orphaned packages. Choose your favorite package and contact us to express your interest.

Note: Please note that packages which have been abandoned by their upstream maintainers do not qualify as orphaned packages. We don't want to maintain dead packages and they will be removed in the near future.

6.  What it takes to be a Proxied Maintainer

Enthusiasm

Proxy Maintainers should be interested in the packages that they are maintaining. By becoming a Proxy Maintainer you are essentially the person in charge of that package in Gentoo. When users have questions regarding a package and how it works in Gentoo, you and will be the person that those questions are directed towards. We would like you to enjoy the maintaince and not feel as though it is a chore. To that end we are looking for enthusiastic people.

Teamwork

Your work will be reviewed by your a member of the team for violations of Gentoo QA policy; much of the policy is based more on common sense and less on specific rules. If your work does not meet QA your, one of us will notify you of where this occurs and will help you fix the problems to ensure that you work meets guidelines and can be included in the Gentoo package repository. Please do not take offense to these suggestions; all criticism should be intended as constructive criticism.

Interest

Similarly in the vein above, don't Proxy-Maintain a package you know very little about unless you are dead sure you can get up to speed on it. For many packages this is not a big problem (many are quite small). However for larger applications and/or libraries it is important to have prior knowledge about the package in question. Bugs about the package will be directed toward you (and also your Commiter). However as Proxy-Maintainer you are responsible for responding to the bugs with patches/comments/etc. Be prepared to do this.

Patience

Due to the increased number of packages this team maintains, we may forget or be slow in committing your fixes. Please be patient with us; however, don't be afraid to prod every once in a while on the status of your patches or ebuilds if we are not responsive.

7.  Help for Developers who act as proxy maintainers

Bugs assigned to maintainer-needed@gentoo.org

Developers who participate in this project should encourage users to participate in this project when they notice a open bug for an orphaned package. This template (or a similar one) can be used to inform users about this project.

QA/Required knowledge and tools

We understand that you may have limited experience with Gentoo ebuilds. Therefore, you should have a brief look on the devmanual and the required tools in order to make sure your ebuild meets our QA standards.



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Page updated December 21, 2012

Summary: Proxy maintainers is a group of developers maintaining abandoned packages on behalf of Gentoo users.

Markos Chandras
Author

Alec Warner
Author

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