[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Packaging and Release Management] Releasing repositories form "other" people

[Dirk Thomas]

We have talked about the topic in todays meeting and we came to the following conclusion. Doing "drive-by" releases have the advantage of making the package easier accessible for more users. But the downside of not being possible of notifying the person who did the release outweights the benefit in our opinion.

Therefore we think one of the following steps should be taken (clearly preferring the first):

* Contact the current maintainer, propose to help, request access to upstream / gbp repos in order to make releases.

  * When being granted write access to the gbp to do new releases please still add yourself as a maintainer to the package manifest files in order to receive notifications.

* If the current maintainer is not responsive (a single day isn't enough to conclude that) and you still want to release the package there are two different paths forward depending on the "location" of the upstream and gbp repo:

  * If the repos are hosted on GitHub within an `ros-` org unit the admins of the org unit will usually grant the necessary access to these repo (just post in this category and reference previous attempts to contact the maintainer).

  * If nobody else beside the original author (which doesn't respond) has access you should fork the repo, add yourself as a maintainer in the package manifest files, and create a new release from the fork. Please also reference the communication attempt in the rosdistro PR so that it is obvious why you should be allowed to "claim" the existing package / repo name.

This is pretty much in line with what is already documented in the wiki (see http://wiki.ros.org/MaintenanceGuide#Claiming_Maintainership). With the details of this thread it might just be more clear that "drive-by" releases are not desired.






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