# New Merge Policy for an always-green hydra

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-merge-policy-for-an-always-green-hydra/8889
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [September 4, 2020, 7:18pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-merge-policy-for-an-always-green-hydra/8889 "2020-09-04T19:18:18Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 47

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### Author: ![timokau](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/timokau/32/40_2.png) [@timokau](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/timokau)
#### Post date: [September 23, 2020, 8:47am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/new-merge-policy-for-an-always-green-hydra/8889/47 "2020-09-23T08:47:15Z")

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> [@kevincox](#):
>
> > [@timokau](#):
> >
> > … Many packages have no formal maintainer. We need to decide who is responsible. One approach would be to go down the graph to the nearest maintained dependency(s).
> 
> This is a good point to bring up. I think we should probably go the other direction though. I think that if a package is broken we should try contacting the maintainers of the _dependents_ next.

Yes, that’s what I had in mind (though not what I said 😆). Its still not entirely trivial, since you would have to decide _which_ “reverse maintainers” are responsible (which might be a lot). This is not a blocker though, we would just need to decide on something.

> [@kevincox](#):
>
> This does raise the question about leaf packages. We can consider doing the following things:
> 
> - Don’t let them block and other changes, they quickly get marked as broken.

I think this is the way to go. If somebody cares about the package, they can then adopt it after they notice it has been marked as broken and doesn’t have a maintainer.

> [@kevincox](#):
>
> This also doesn’t specify how we determine if a maintainer has abandoned a package. It would be nice to have some sort of automation around this as well. However if we see they have been inactive for an extended period of time (1 month?) we can remove them from packages. Worst case they are on an extended offline period and can revert the PR to claim their packages back.

[We need more defined guidelines for package inclusion](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/we-need-more-defined-guidelines-for-package-inclusion/3592) might interest you.

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