[oi-dev] Discussing maintainers visibility in oi-userland

[Aurélien Larcher]

À Jeudi 11 mai 2017, Adam Števko a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to keep the status quo in this. We don’t have formal maintainers and basically every change to the package/component is reviewed by relevant person (me/alp/aurelien//jimklimov/wacki/agnar). I would really like to see this list to grow and reach the phase that we need to start think about maintainers, but we are not yet there. The situation right now is that even if a person reviews the change and think that other person should have a look, e.g. me when I am reviewing some libs that might affect GUI i ask alp for crossreview or when alp touches X11 things, he ask aurelien etc.
> 
> I would avoid creating a dedicated maintainers for now. If people really think it should be done, I would say it should be done on a technology stacks, e.g. Python, Ruby, webservers, X11, databases etc. In such cases every change would need to be approved by a relevant person. However, I think that might introduce latency and bureaucracy, which is really non-existent right now. I would like to keep it that way if possible.

Maybe maintainer was a bad word, probably, as Peter suggested, it is more about having reference persons per group, so that questions could be directed. I do not know.
I am happy about the current system.
The question occured because I wondered whether people exterior to our group may find the apparent lack of formal organization confusing.
If it is the case, is there anything to do about it?

Darek's question shows that something could be mentioned about lack of ownership of components and review of PRs.
Just to formalize the informal nature of the process. ;) 

> 
> Cheers,
> Adam
> 
> > On May 11, 2017, at 9:13 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 6:56 PM, Aurélien Larcher <aurelien.larcher at gmail.com <mailto:aurelien.larcher at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > 
> > The question raised is whether we should formalize a maintaining process for some important components or groups of components.
> > 
> > At some point I joked about a campaign going like "Adopt a package".
> > 
> > There are downsides to having a formal owner: they can become a
> > bottleneck, and it might discourage others to contribute in an area
> > where there's an individual (or individuals) listed. Also, people may be
> > reluctant to contribute if there's a prospect of being lumbered with
> > the responsibility going forward.
> > 
> > But, if you can avoid that, then there are benefits to having what we
> > would call "Subject Matter Experts" for components or groups. Having
> > someone who is reasonably familiar with the component, preferably
> > someone who uses it, is useful as a source of help and advice, and
> > having a list of such people and their specialities would be useful to
> > other contributors.
> > 
> > Putting such a list on display would also show that OI wasn't just a
> > one or two person effort, which would be good.
> > 
> > --
> > -Peter Tribble
> > http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ <http://www.petertribble.co.uk/> - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ <http://ptribble.blogspot.com/>_______________________________________________
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> 
>

-- 
Thanks for sailing Jolla :)