[Mapserver-dev] MapServer CVS access and long term support

[Daniel Morissette]

The email about the mapmygis.c patch that was sent a few minutes ago on 
this list brings up an issue that is getting more important as more 
developers are contributing to the software: long term support. It's 
normal for people to come and go, that's life, but we need to make sure 
we don't end up with too much orphan code with no active maintainer.

I think that if you get CVS commit privileges then you also have to make 
a committment to supporting your contributions in the long run and/or 
fixing any side-effects they may create. You also take responsibility 
for anything you commit to CVS on behalf of someone else (i.e.patches). 
If for some reason you cannot continue to support your code then you 
should find someone to take over responsibility for it. If nobody wants 
to take over responsibility for the code then you have a serious 
problem. You cannot just expect that the other developers will grab all 
the lose ends if you walk away, we're all busy enought already.

What do you think? Is this asking too much from developers before they 
are allowed to contribute? I think we should have a page somewhere that 
explains what the rules are for contributing to the software and this 
would be one of them.

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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