Re: admin/MAINTAINER edits

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2015 16:00:50 -0400
> 
> What's going on with all these pointless (IMO) admin/MAINTAINER edits?

They aren't pointless.  I asked for them.

> Section 3 "the list of areas for which no maintainer has been found so far"
> has recently been filled out with a huge dump of files. Eg
> 
> lisp/calendar/*
> lisp/gnus/*
> lisp/progmodes/f90.el
> etc etc
> 
> These things are not unmaintained.
> Nor are the vast majority of items in that section.

Then let's remove the files that are not unmaintained.  In fact, the
entire section 3 could go away, as it doesn't provide any useful
information, IMO.

> IMO MAINTAINERS, which was neglected for years, isn't very important.
> I was hoping to just see it go away, not get revived. It just sits
> around duplicating information, getting outdated, and not being used.

Many/most our files say the maintainer is FSF, which is not very
useful.  MAINTAINERS fills that gap.  It's a single file that needs to
be consulted, so I don't see a problem if it repeats what some files
already say.

> If someone is listed in an individual file's header, listing them again
> in this file is just pointless duplication.

I don't think this duplication is something we should worry about.

> (And the presumption is that the Author is the Maintainer if none is
> explicitly listed.)

That assumption is incorrect in many cases.  The original authors are
long gone or lost interest or no longer work on Emacs.

We are going to a period of time where maintenance is scattered
between many more people than it was before.  It's quite possible that
this period will last forever.  How else could I or you or someone
else know whom to ask to look into some specific problem that was
reported and not handled soon enough?  The current situation with
timely handling bug reports and other problems is IMO intolerable, and
we must somehow make it better.  I think when someone declares his/her
interests in public, that will cause them feel more responsible for
those parts, and will allow us to ping them when they miss the
original reports for some reason.

So I think on balance this file is helpful.

> IMO the MAINTAINERS files was only every really "useful" for abstract
> things like
> 
> Jason Rumney
>       W32
> 
> (BTW, that entry is fairly obviously no longer appropriate, as are some
> others.)

Feel free to delete those you know are no longer appropriate.