openSUSE:Package maintainership guide

Package maintainership guide to regulate all the tidbits about collaboration and communication in openSUSE Build Service

General guidelines

The development of openSUSE Tumbleweed and the subsequent release of the distribution is supported by the technical roles outlined below. The roles defined provide a general guideline and set basic expectations. Each person filling any one or multiple roles has the freedom to interpret these guidelines to fit her or his desired participation level.

To learn all the tricks of maintainers we recommend reading through How to become a packager.

Package maintainer

• You should submit and manage your package in openSUSE Tumbleweed and follow the How to contribute to Factory guide.
• Your package should always build in the devel project as described in the above guide for openSUSE Factory/Tumbleweed project.
• You decide and enable/disable all the projects you want the package to build on (SLE, openSUSE,...).
• You are to review in a timely manner all the submissions sent against your package. This should be around a week so you should be able to work on openSUSE only as your week time permits.
• You should respond on bugs and email questions about the package in the same time frame.
• You should adhere to the general packaging guidelines as outlined in this wiki section overall.

Package/Project bugowner

• You inherently are the guy everyone reports issues to, the only difference compared to the maintainer is that you don't have direct write access to the project/package you are set as bugowner to.

Devel project maintainer

• Instead of maintaining just one package you are set as maintainer of all the packages in the specified devel project.
• You have all the responsibilities of the package maintainer for all the packages in the project.
• If there is set package maintainer for package in the project you should give him the time to react himself as per rules for packager. There are exceptions from this rule for
  1. whitespace/typo fix
  2. urgent build fix (package broke build of most other packages in the project or in openSUSE Tumbleweed).
• You should encourage occasional contributors to become package maintainers if they submit often and show skills required for the task.