openSUSE:Duties and rights of a Factory maintainer

Jump to: navigation, search


Being a maintainer of a package in Factory means that you are responsible for it. This comes with both duties and rights.

Duties

Always keep your packages buildable and usable

Factory should always be usable by users, as this will help increase the quality and stability of the next release.

So make sure that your packages always build (obviously) and are always working before pushing them to Factory.

Handle reported bugs

Having a package in Factory means that your package will get used by more users. And at some point, people will find bugs and report them in our Bugzilla. Those bugs should not be ignored.

Usually, bugs should get forwarded upstream once there are enough details for upstream to solve the bug. As a distribution, we cannot fix all bugs ourselves and we should instead work with upstream to get the bugs fixed.

For bugs filed against released version of openSUSE, it is possible to release a maintenance update of the package to ship bug fixes to users. See the maintenance documentation for more details.

Deal with security issues

For the whole lifetime of a released version of openSUSE, we do our best to provide updates for security issues. So keep in mind that adding your package to Factory means that you will be responsible for the security updates for your package.

See the maintenance documentation for more details.

Cooperate with other Factory contributors

The openSUSE distribution would not work without close cooperation between the different contributors. It is common that a change in a package affects other packages. For instance, updating a library to a new version might break other packages. Therefore, it is important to always wonder if the changes you are doing to your package might affect other Factory contributors.

Similarly, it makes sense to work with other Factory contributors to adopt the same set of guidelines to package similar modules.

The opensuse-packaging mailing list can be used for such cooperation.

Accept contributions

As a Factory maintainer, you will receive submit requests from other contributors to your packages. Those requests can be about updating to a new upstream version, fixing a bug, or enabling some feature, to just name a few possibilities.

It is important to welcome such contributions and to not consider your packages as your own private property that nobody else should touch. This is one way to help people become more involved in the project.

Follow upstream development

It definitely helps to follow what upstream is doing for the packages you are maintaining. This way, you know the changes that will come in the future, which prepares you to integrate the new versions, but it also puts you in a better position to contribute back upstream with the patches you add to your packages or when forwarding bugs.

Rights

Decide what feature gets enabled

As the maintainer of a package, it is up to you to decide if a specific feature should be enabled or disabled in a package. Of course, important decisions should be taken after discussion with other members in the community if they are affected by the change.