In Guix we came to the conclusion [2] that having shared package “ownership”—or, to put it differently, not having explicit ownership—is a solution that works best for us. In practice, most packages have a few associated experts who take care of most updates and fixes to them. However, as a group, the fact that there’s no name explicitly attached to the package means that every committer can feel empowered to modify it.
The pros and cons of per-package maintainers are often debated, notably in the context of Debian where strong ownership has shown its limits [3].
I actually added the per-package ‘maintainers’ field in Nixpkgs [0] and removed it in Guix [1]. :-)
[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/7b7ed8f1af447f7d2ddb...
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=154f1f...
In Guix we came to the conclusion [2] that having shared package “ownership”—or, to put it differently, not having explicit ownership—is a solution that works best for us. In practice, most packages have a few associated experts who take care of most updates and fixes to them. However, as a group, the fact that there’s no name explicitly attached to the package means that every committer can feel empowered to modify it.
The pros and cons of per-package maintainers are often debated, notably in the context of Debian where strong ownership has shown its limits [3].
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-12/msg000...
[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/708163/