[Gdal-dev] RFC 9: Paid Maintainer Guidelines

[Frank Warmerdam]

Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> One note to the following statement:
> 
> "Substantial new development projects will only be taken on by the
> maintainer with the direction of a PSC motion (or possibly an RFC
> designating the maintainer to work on a change)."
> 
> I understand, it regulates potential tasks the maintainer
> can take from external entities. Is my understanding correct?

Mateusz,

Sorry, it was not my intention that this have anything to do with
work the maintainer would do outside the maintenance contract.
Instead it is an effort to avoid having the maintainer end up
spending most of their time on new development without the
agreement of the PSC.  That is, I hope the "maintainer" role to be
primarily focused on stuff that isn't brand new development, and
this clause is in support of that notion.

I don't wish to interfere in any way with what the maintainer does
"on their own time".  That is, outside the bounds of the contracted
maintainer time.

> A question about reporting, I'd suggest to include a note to the
> guidelines that the maintainer is obliged to spend substantial amount of
> hours on tasks weekly, to avoid empty reports :-)
> 
> I mean, if the maintainer is contracted to spend 100 hours/month,
> then, technically, it's possible to work out this amount of hours
> in 2 weeks, so next 2 weeks will bring empty reports.
> If such situations should be avoided, then the guidelines
> should include a note about that to give general regulations of monthly
> timetable.

Good point.  Well, in particular i'd like to see the maintainer being
the first level of review for new bug reports so they are being treated
more quickly and consistently than is now the case.  And for this (and
mailing list support) to work well it implies the maintainer is at least
monitoring and responding to new items on an ongoing basis.

I'll try to write in something to cover the above without being draconian.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org