[Pan-users] Re: Pruning a thread rule

[Duncan]

Torstein Sunde posted
<address@hidden>, excerpted below,
 on Mon, 08 Sep 2003 01:46:39 +0200:

> Charles (Pan's maintainer)

Shouldn't that be "lead developer"?  I'm fairly new (~ two years) to
software libre, but have read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and some of
the other essays on the culture of open source.  As I understand it,
"lead developer" refers to the current application development coordinator
(while recognizing the input of others), while "maintainer" refers to the
packager for a specific distribution, who may be adding distribution
specific patches and doing other development related activity, but limited
to the distribution, and perhaps others in the same family (thus RH and
Mdk, for instance).

Thus, the recent controversy (as reported in LWN) in the Debian camp
especially, when a "maintainer" was stripping out the acknowledgments the
"lead developer" was including, including that of the lead developer. 
Said lead developer concluded that if his acks were stripped, then
certainly non of his work would still be included, as that is just /not/
an acceptable practice in free source culture.  If its an entirely
different fork, then any new code he includes couldn't /possibly/ be
included in the Debian package, since it didn't include his name. 
Therefore, it was safe for him to introduce code that would cause the
application to fail to run on Debian, with a note to that effect, since at
/minimum/ said code would be inspected by the maintainer and stripped, and
actually none should be included at all, since the acks were stripped.

Well, the proverbial stench creating material hit the fan when the code
WAS included in the Debian package, without changes, and still without
ack.  Said maintainer lost his community respect, with a lot of differing
opinion on whether any more packages from the lead developer should be
included in the Debian distrib or not.  My opinion, of course, is that
said lead developer had every right to include said "unsupporting" code in
his app, since he had every right to believe that none of his code was
being included in the distrib package anyway, since his acks had been
stripped.  In the free source community, as I said, that is simply /not/
done, because in many cases, that's the ONLY pay developers get for their
time and energy invested.  Thus, robbing them of their acks is akin to
sticking a gun to the head of a proprietary-ware developer, and robbing
him of his paycheck!  It is a SERIOUS crime, within the free (both as in
source and as in beer) community.

Anyway..  I did check FOLDOC.  It seems "maintainer" has two definitions, 
#2 is as I define it above, but in FOLDOC limited to the Debian community,
tho it does seem to be being used that way now commonly in the Red Hat /
RPM based community as well.  #1 is a bit ambiguous in terms of this
distinction, but does seem to fit Charles' role as "lead developer", based
on two clues..  a: the "package maintainer" definition is separate, as #2.
b: it mentions the one responsible for version updates (usually the
author), which would imply "lead developer" as I use the terms.  Thus,
your usage is correct, altho it does seem the Debian originated usage for
"maintainer" as "package maintainer" is gaining popularity, with a
corresponding necessary distinction then being made between that and
"application maintainer", by changing the latter to "lead developer",
which wasn't an entry in the version of FOLDOC I looked it up in.  So,
your usage is indeed correct, tho I'd say being gradually superseded by
the usage as I outlined.

Anyone else?  Charles?  Do you have a preference?  (I do notice that you
don't claim either in the about box, just have yourself listed first, and
as the exclusive @rebelbase.com address, plus, it's generally your name
attached to the announcements, tho I saw one recently announced by Chris.)

That reminds me..  Chris?  What do you prefer to be called.  Is first mate
or first assistant or lead bug squasher and contributor appropriate, or do
you have a better/different preferred title.

(I recently (last two days) started to describe the position of the two of
you, but stopped when I realized I didn't have a term I wasn't sure
wouldn't be offensive in some way for Chris.  Thus, I simply referred to
the about box..   You probably remember the post..)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin