[asterisk-dev] [policy] Bug Tracker Workflow Discussion

[Russell Bryant]

Chris Tooley wrote:
> As no one person has the ability to even come close to being an expert on
> the entire code base, I'd vote for the lieutenant model.  Not necessarily
> someone that "owns" a piece of code, but more likely someone that knows
> most about a particular group of applications, resources, channels, etc and
> can make informed decisions about direction and appropriateness of things
> that need committed, delayed or seriously reworked.  Maintainer is, to me,
> an ugly name for the task, it reeks of code-ownership, which is almost never
> a good thing.

The use of maintainer in the original message was a poor choice.  The 
use of that term really comes from years ago when I really did act as a 
maintainer.  With Asterisk 1.0, I literally reviewed every commit to CVS 
HEAD / SVN trunk and determined whether I thought it should be 
backported to Asterisk 1.0.  Then, if so, I did the backport and committing.

Today, our development model is much different.  There are _many_ 
developers that make decisions about patches and merge them into 
releases every day.  However, we still have some people that reserve the 
right to make a final call when needed.  That generally only happens in 
gray areas of bug vs. feature.

-- 
Russell Bryant
Senior Software Engineer
Open Source Team Lead
Digium, Inc.