[Python-Dev] Encouraging developers

[dustin at v.igoro.us]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 01:51:41PM -0600, skip at pobox.com wrote:
> 
>     dustin> In summary, create a layer of volunteer, non-committing
>     dustin> maintainers for specific modules who agree to do in-depth
>     dustin> analysis of patches for their areas of expertise, and pass
>     dustin> well-formed, reviewed patches along to committers.
> 
> One problem with this sort of system is that it's difficult for many people
> to commit the personal resources necessary over a long period of time.  Life
> often gets in the way.   <snip>

This is *definitely* the core problem with this system, and has plagued
every project to use a variant of it (including many small projects with
only one developer who takes months to respond to email).  I think one
*advantage* of this system would be that, with patch submitters having a
specific person to whom their patches should be addressed,
non-responsiveness on that person's part would be detected and brought
to the community's attention more quickly.  

It would help a great deal to have a very formalized system in place for
promoting/demoting maintainers -- email templates with filterable
subject lines and specific addresses to send them to, specific expected
response times, etc.

As someone else said in another thread, we all think that everyone
thinks like us (I think that's tautological?).  My thinking is that a
lot of people like me would love to have a small "corner of Python" for
which they are responsible.

Dustin