On 09/04/24 08:52, Simon Richter wrote:
Otoh, I am fully aware of the "you can't force a volunteer to do things", knowing that I myself would be the first one to violently oppose a decision that I don't like while - at the same time - being mad at some core package maintainers who have forced the project to jump through even more burning hoops to finally get the usrmerge migrationThe project has always had, and continues to have the two options "submit a patch" and "replace the maintainer." We have processes for that.No one, especially not the people driving the usrmerge migration, wants to do that, because that would require taking on a long-term commitment and the responsibility that comes with it, when they would prefer to do a drive-by contribution.Hence we are having a debate again whether there should be a mechanism to force maintainers to accept any patch thrown at them by someone "authorized" to perform a global change. No result can be reached from this debate, because there is no difference between force-accepting a contribution and replacing a maintainer.
Between forcing maintainers to accept drive-by patches as-is and replacing them, there is also the option of asking maintainers to respond to patches in a "timely"* fashion instead of letting them rot in the BTS or forcing the requester to do an NMU.
"A timely response" could be two weeks for packages in (build-)essential, one month for top-10% popcon packages, three months for all other packages. Tagging as "wontfix" would also be an OK response, at least the project will have a clear and explicit view of what is blocking distro-wide changes.
Regards, -- Gioele Barabucci