M-N packages are assigned now to: Assignee: maintainer-needed@gentoo.org No maintainer - Look at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proxy_Maintainers if you want to take care of it This reads like "If you want to get your single patch merged, become proxied maintainer". We see the outcome in the short duration of activity of many proxied maintainers. Too many have 1 commit per package when they are retired after 1-2 years with a long list of open bug tickets. These users never wanted to maintain. They just wanted to make a single contribution. Please remove Proxied Maintainers Project from the "maintainer-needed@gentoo.org" contact Reproducible: Always
I don't agree with this. Proxy-maint is the _only_ project that deals with (user) contributions to maintainer-needed packages. Also I'd debate it's the whole purpose of said project - to revive and take care of actively used m-n packages. Instead you should write that it's okay to make fixes to m-n packages _without_ having to become a proxied maintainer. However a package without a dedicated maintainer is a suspect of a fast removal _any_ given time it starts causing trouble.
As far as I'm aware, taking care of maintainer-needed packages was the reason why proxy-maint was formed in the first place.
* every dev can work on m-n * every dev can merge user contributions
(In reply to Jonas Stein from comment #3) > * every dev can work on m-n > * every dev can merge user contributions Sure, they can, but do they? I've only seen a handful of contributions to m-n be merged by non-proxy-maint people this year. Devs know that m-n are basically free-for-all, but this is a message to users. What do you suggest the alternative be, then? "Ping random people and hope someone cares"? I'd argue non-dev contributors have their best chance of their contribution be reviewed via proxy-maint. As I already said, the docs should state that fixes to m-n packages are accepted without having to become a maintainer for it, but these packages may be removed due to not-maintained status.
"Look at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proxy_Maintainers if you want to take care of it" While this is not totally wrong, it seems that we mislead the volunteers here. Perhaps some read "it" as the bug, while we mean "care for all bugs and keep the package up to date over the next years"
