recipe, machine and distro maintainers

[Frans Meulenbroeks]

Dear TSC,

As suggested by Christopher (kergoth) on irc, I am writing this email
to ask for guidance on recipe and distro maintainers.
Apparently quite some recipes and even some distro's have no clear maintainer.
(see my analysis in
http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/openembedded-devel/2010-August/022698.html)

My proposal is to reintroduce the MAINTAINER field in distro and
machine configurations and in recipes so it is clear who to contact if
there are issues.
Eventually this could even lead to a split of our recipes in a
maintained and a contributed (a nice word for unmaintained) directory.

I know we had a discussion on maintainers two years back and there
were good reasons to move to a MAINTAINERS file, but apparently that
does work even less.
The MAINTAINERS file is not up to date and a lot of recipes are orphaned.

My proposal would be that the TSC discusses this and (if agreed that
this is a good way forward) comes up with a guideline to have a
MAINTAINER field in the recipe, and requesting developers to take
explicit ownership of recipes.

If this is felt to be big a step, I suggest to start with distro
owners, then machine owners, then recipe owners.

Frans.

PS: wrt OEDEM: I would suggest to add quality on the agenda