Stewardship SIG
The goal of this SIG is to provide (temporary) maintenance of important packages that are in danger of being removed from the distribution.
This usually happens when the main maintainer of a package orphans it - be it for lack of interest, time, or resources - or decides to maintain the package as a module only, and to orphan and eventually retire the "normal" package. However, as this can have consequences for a large set of dependent packages (and users), this SIG would step in to take on (probably temporary) maintenance of important packages (hence the name "Stewardship").
For example, a large set of Java packages has been orphaned recently (because the old maintainer will only make them available as modules in the future). If the process for retiring orphaned packages after six weeks is followed in this case, major components of fedora would be torn down with them - for example, LibreOffice.
Essentially, this SIG / Group will step in to make sure that fedora (especially rawhide) doesn't blow up due to the unexpected retirement of important, but previously orphaned packages (and their dependencies).
Organization
This SIG is organized around the @stewardship-sig FAS group: https://src.fedoraproject.org/group/stewardship-sig
There also exists a private mailing list, which you are welcome to subscribe to: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/stewardship-sig.lists.fedoraproject.org
This private list is mostly used for internal matters and Bugzilla e-mail. Use a public mailing list, such as devel, to discuss any general topics.
IRC meetings happen every other Tuesday on 16:00 UTC (or 15:00 UTC, if the EU is on DST) in the #fedora-meeting-1 channel on freenode.
Adding a package to be maintained by the SIG
If you think a package would be a good fit for our SIG, you can propose it on the current "we need these packages" ticket in our project on pagure. If such a ticket doesn't currently exist, just open a new one using the package_suggestion template.
Since packages are always "owned" by users and never groups, in order to save a package from being retired, one of our package maintainers must claim it via a releng ticket for themselves. Once they are main admin (owner) of the package, they add the @stewardship-sig group as admin as well. This way, all group members can act on the package.
Optionally, the primary BugZilla contact can be changed to @stewardship-sig in fedora-scm-requests.
Removing a package from the SIG
If it's decided that maintenance for a specific package is no longer necessary (for example, because of dependency tree trimming), the steps outlined above are executed in reverse, in opposite order: request a reset of the primary BugZilla contact (if applicable), remove the SIG group from the package, give the package to the new owner (usually orphan), and remove yourself from the package.
Members
- Fabio Valentini "decathorpe"
- Neal Gompa "ngompa"
- Kevin Fenzi "kevin"
- Jakub Jelen "jjelen"
- Gwyn Ciesla "limb"
- Jan Staněk "jstanek"
- Alexander Scheel "cipherboy"
- Dinesh Prasanth M K "dmoluguw"