+1. Thank you Miro for raising this.

The problem I see with this is that packages are piling up meaningless co-maintainers that make it appear as a package is maintained by a lot of people while in reality it is not. How about adding them as watchers to the repo and changing the reporting script to mention them, too?

Hello,
I believe for a package is better if it has two or three maintainers.

When orphaning a package you do not kick out all the current other co-maintainers of the package, so it would probably make more sense to keep the original owner on the level of the co-maintainer.

Also in your proposed solution - watchers probably are not mentioned in the report of the packages orphaned ... so it is not solving this problem.

If bug in a package gets unnoticed by the main owner for some time, the new process is (Miro is running the automated scripts) that such package gets orphaned. Not that the ticket gets assigned to the second maintainer, but a package gets orphaned. When report is generated the co-maintainers gets mentioned in the report of the orphaned packages, but not the original package owner.

For example I do co-maintain some packages with athmane and it happened in the past that one of us was available to fix the package and the other was not and vice versa.

Last time this happened for example with the ncrack and smilner ... I would be happy to keep smilner as co-maintainer of the ncrack, he was owning and maintaining the package for long, just probably doesn't have got time right now to notice - possibly due to corona virus frenzy. That's why we other maintainers (=fab+me) fixed the FTBFS bug. I am OK to take over the package ownership now, but in my opinion there is no reason to kick smilner out of the package during this process.

Best regards
Michal Ambroz

I hate to cause more noise, but how about a seperate script (or add on to the existing ones) that finds all orphaned, non retired packages that have co-maintainers (commit or admin) and mails them a seperate email with something like:

package foo is orphaned and you are a co-maintainer of it. Please check with any other co-maintainers and have one of you take main admin. If you do not, this package will be retired.

I would hope people would notice normally, but perhaps an additional specific email on this would be worth doing?

Hello Kevin,
this is about different issue. I believe that when orphaning packages in this automated way based on the un-responded bugzilla tickets, the original owner should become co-maintainer rather than being completely kicked from the package. Others co-maintainers stay, so why the owner should be kicked out?

Mail to co-owners is already happening (Miro is doing that mailint) and that is not the issue here.
I consider current mailing to owners and co-maintainers to be sufficient.
See for example - https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg268447.html
That is for example how I learned about the issue with the ncrack and took ownership of that package.

The issue is that original owners get kicked out from the package during the orphaning process and do not stay as the other co-maintainers stay with the package.

Let's continue with the example of ncrack.
Situation before orphaning:
- smilner is the owner, fab and rebus (me) co-maintainers.

Orphaning happened based on the https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1799676 .
Smilner failed to respond to the ticket and was kicked from the package based on the orphaning procedure.

After orphaning:
- orphan is the owner, rebus and fab co-maintainers.

Smilner is not getting the follow-up communication after this date

Then I have fixed the FTBFS and become owner.
- I am owner (rebus), rebus and fab co-maintainers.

I would welcome smilner to be kept as co-maintainer ... he has at least the same right to stay there as "fab" who stayed there during the orphaning + reclaiming process.