Qt Contributors Summit 2022 - Program/Ghost Maintainers

Session Summary

There are Qt modules that have maintainers who are largely absent, yet we have no formal process for handling this situation; and Maintainers != Gerrit's list.

Session Owners

Andy Nichols, Paul Tvete, Eddy

Notes

We discussed the issue of some maintainers quietly disappearing, without overtly relinquishing their maintainership.

One proposal was to automatically retire any maintainer that failed to either participate in a round of API change review for their module or appoint a deputy to look after that for them. Naturally this would then prompt an effort to recruit a replacement. The status quo is that maybe someone will send an e-mail to such a maintainer's last recorded e-mail address and ask if they'd be willing to step down, optionally nominating a successor in the process; and maybe they get a reply. If the e-mail address is stale or they simply get no reply, there's no process for what to do next, short of the full-blown process of a vote of no confidence in the given maintainer.

No consensus was reached on a definite conclusion or plan of action.