On collaborative maintenance

Following Zack’s and Lucas’ posts regarding group maintenance of packages: Do I have to AOL with you guys? Yes, I also agree with Zack’s both 1 and 2. And I also want to share the bit of experience we have got in this regard in the pkg-perl group. In our case, group maintainership has often saved our collective butts. We have also debated somewhat which way should our packages’ maintainership be handled. In the end, our packages’ maintainer will (most usually) be the pkg-perl group itself, subscribed through an alias that reaches all of us. Then, every group member that feels identified with the package lists himself as an uploader (note that this does not necessarily have a relation with the last uploads, at least not as strongly as in what the KDE and Gnome groups do, according to Lucas’ post - it’s closer to the pkg-ruby-extras handling). Of course, there are some packages which I have NMUed in the group’s pool - packages I prefer not to have listed in my maintainer page, as I don’t usually care too much about them, but I happened to be able to fix a bug with them.
Now, what about the roles of the different group members? Each of us has some skills that make him better for part of the task - i.e., we have an amazingly knowledgeable member, Niko Tyni. He just fixes all the bugs that baffle us. Honest, my best kudos to Niko, he is a good part of our team’s success. And then, we have hard-working people as Gregor Hermann, who not only fixes also nice amounts of bugs, but also writes and runs general QA tests throughout our over 300 modules. Neither of them is a DD yet. And of course, many other hard-working folks. Some of us are DDs and try to upload promptly - and, of course, also try fixing bugs. So far, we are in good shape, and we tend not to lag too much. I have taken some vacation periods (both announced and unannounced - sorry :) ), but to my surprise and amazement, my packages tend not to be buggy - Why? Because there is a real team looking after them, and in the end, we keep an eye on each other.
For the pkg-perl group, group maintenance has really worked. We collectively maintain more packages than it would be reasonable for all of us added together as individuals, and they are in a better shape. There are several things we can make better, and we do try to address them - it is not yet heaven, but… :) I’ll elaborate later, when I finish a text I’m preparing for presenting at YAPC (it’s not that long, of course - During Debconf, I showed advances of it to several people… I just have left it aside). Right now… Well, I have 3hr of sleep left before we leave for a daytrip to the beautiful (but hot and humid!) Veracruz Huasteca. See you on Sunday/Monday!