12 more charms without maintainers - Time to think about how we handle orphans

[Clint Byrum]

Everybody, first, thanks to all of you who stepped up and took on the
job of charm maintainer. We have 84 official precise charms, and 79 of
them have an official maintainer.

The remaining 11 are here:


 teamspeak3          : Bruno Pereira <brunopereira81 at gmail.com>
 kusabax             : Chris Hardee <shazzner at gmail.com>
*appflower           : Jimmi Andersen <ja at appflower.com>
 roundcube           : Nick Barcet <nick.barcet at canonical.com>
 limesurvey          : Nick Barcet <nick.barcet at canonical.com>
 znc                 : Patrick Hetu <patrick.hetu at gmail.com>
 openerp-web         : Patrick Hetu <patrick.hetu at gmail.com>
 openerp-server      : Patrick Hetu <patrick.hetu at gmail.com>
 python-moinmoin     : Patrick Hetu <patrick.hetu at gmail.com>


*authors have committed to being maintainers, but have not submitted
 new charm with maintainer assigned yet.

Now, there are also two charms which have no maintainers, which the
authors have said they are not interested in ongoing maintenance:

 buildbot-master
 buildbot-slave

So, we have to find out what we do in this case, as it won't be the first time.

I suggest we have a simple policy:

* Anyone can open a bug against a charm and suggest that it be orphaned.
* If nobody claims maintainership within 30 days, the charm is
  officially "orphaned". Its maintainer will be set to 'Orphaned
  <juju at lists.ubuntu.com>'
* A motion, filed as a bug against the orphaned charm, followed by a
  +1 from some other member of charmers will lead to a charm's removal,
  or adoption by the person or team recommended in the motion.

So, as a first step, I have opened bugs against all of the charms above.
In 30 days, any unclaimed charms will be orphaned and then motions for
removal/adoption can be filed. I also filed a bug against charm-tools
so that review-queue will show orphan bugs since charmers will need to
handle the orphaning process.

This process will depend on us knowing whats going on with our maintained
charms, so I've written a report which calls out unsubscribed maintainers:

http://people.canonical.com/~clint/unsubscribed-maintainers.txt

So, if you see your name listed there, please head over to the charm's
bug home page and subsribe to bugs. The report is updated quite frequently.

https://launchpad.net/charms/+source/<charmname>

Note that any errors can be seen here, that might help explain why your
name does or does not appear on the report.

http://people.canonical.com/~clint/errors-unsubscribed-maintainers.txt

Also in this process I had to do 'charm getall' a few times and it is
really quite slow. If you really do need all the charm branches, I've
setup a nightly tarball for all of them here:

http://people.canonical.com/~clint/all-charm-branches.tar.gz
http://people.canonical.com/~clint/all-charms.tar.gz

Please do note that there is no SSL available for people.canonical.com
so these files are just for use in inspecting the charms. Please use
the bzr branches directly from launchpad for any use case where the
integrity of the charm matters.