You might be interested in a recent similar request ( https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2929 ) and the associated discussion.

At my dayjob (aven.io)

That url doesn't resolve for me. Just my computer?

maybe aiven.io ?

sorry yes, aiven.io - typo on my end.

For some public presentations of Aiven, also mentioning using fedora, see https://github.com/aiven/presentations

(the intel link is interesting. We indeed have something similar - a collection of packages used by us, which are only loosely connected.

In a way, we wouldn't need a group if we had some alias system that we could use to sync developers to certain packages more dynamically. It could even be a numbered sig (eg 34552-sig) - we really only want to use it so we can add/remote our people from the group and that if we add a group member, they get commit on the packages. Or we can give us a very vague generic name, eg "fedora-cloud-tools-sig" or something, We have zero interest in making it exclusive in any way.

So we have two rather similar requests: this and #2929 from Intel folks. In the other ticket, we started having a discussion whether a SIG would be better, but I think it's clear that a SIG would be possibility, but it seems that there's no real desire or need to form one, except to fill a checkbox required by current process, since having a SIG is the only documented way to get a contributor group. We shouldn't ask people to form a SIG which is going to become stale immediately anyway, just for this.

My proposal: allow creation of groups for aiven and intel contributors. In the future, accept proposals for similar requests if reasonable. (I'm not sure what the best group names would be; should we indicate that this is a group somehow in the name?)

We would need to amend our processes to deal with groups like this that could stall out contributions to Fedora packages. Right now, we only consider them as individuals, but having employer groups means that it becomes a lot easier to make life difficult for people contributing to packages that are controlled by a company (since different members could apply different stalling techniques, as an example).

I think having group ownership makes it less likely for the package to be stalled completely. Hopefully there'd always be somebody in the group who can do the update.

As you wrote, "groups cannot be the primary maintainers of packages anyway". So there'd always be a primary maintainer. Our non-responsive-maintainer process only changes the assignment of the primary maintainer. Secondary maintainers only matter as far as they make updates to the package, but if they don't do anything, they are essentially ignored by the n-r-m processes. So the group, if it becomes non-responsive and stops updating the package, would be treated as any other (inactive) co-maintainer.

(Or in other words: having such groups just makes it easier to maintain co-maintainer lists. The primary maintainer could already do this by manually adding and removing people from the co-maintainer list.)

OK, let's discuss this during a meeting. I think we need to handle this one way or another.

This was discussed during today's meeting:
- info The idea is approved in general and we'll try to figure out the text of the rule outside of the meeting.
- action nirik to make a proposal
- action davide to help also

@kevin ?

I've been a bit heads down in F38 release work, sorry for the delay.

I started to write up something, but I think I need more information at this point:

• Does fesco want to approve new packager groups? Or just leave it to infrastructure? Note that we probibly don't want to just say any group is fine...

• Do we want to require some documentation or address where people not in the group can see to send concerns/requests for membership, etc?
  ie, should we require all package groups respond on 'package-group-owners@lists.fedoraproject.org' ? or require a wiki page with info?

Perhaps we should discuss this again in the next meeting? Or if preferred I can start a list thread on it?

@kevin Please start a discussion thread when you have a chance. Until then, marking this as stalled.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/VAXTJXXF5OKEPTYWBAXV4ZHYPZP2AZO4/