Solution: secondary maintainer

Hi, All of the blood spilled over unmaintained packages can be solved in one simple way: If you are a maintainer, and you know that you will be out of contact for more than a few days (I don't mean unable to fix, I mean mute), you must assign a secondary maintainer who has both power to fix bugs and to do releases. This can be arbitrated by pear-group. I would suggest that a week of no reply should result in a hostile takeover by pear-group to fix a critical bug with a known fix and do a snapshot release as suggested by Tomas. All disputes of whether a bugfix works or not should be settled by pear-group. If the pear-group people don't have time or technical knowledge of a package, they must delegate someone else to make the decision, and that person's decision must be final, or more blood will spill. It is the responsibility of maintainers to assign someone (publicly through a message to pear-dev) as the temporary lead - I'm not sure how the logistics work through pear.php.net, but I'm sure it can be worked out easily that this person has the lead role assigned so they can release. Any other solution will cause problems. If everyone knows that as a package lead, your responsibility is to answer questions in a timely manner, or assign someone else to do it, then there will be no question of whether a bugfix needs to be committed - you lose control over your project if you give it up, and otherwise, no one has the right to do anything to your project and can lose CVS access. Sound like a good solution to everyone? Greg