Maintenance Working Group Needed

[antoviaque (Xavier Antoviaque (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)]

@feanil

Maintenance here means the same thing as what we meant for the maintainership pilot for the most part. The part that I think is not surprising but is an expansion of meaning is that it should include any necessary upgrades as a part of the work the maintainer would be responsible for. Historically, this has been led by 2U but as more and more repos are not by default editable by 2U, this approach makes less sense.

@feanil Makes sense to me

@feanil

My thought is that anyone willing to step up to maintain a project that needs maintenance is essentially asking for CC access along with taking on some accountability. My goal is to expand access to more people who can do the work of maintaining things.

To simplify the commitment, I liked the way @e0d suggested capturing a complexity factor for the repositories being maintained, to estimate the volume of recurrent work.

If we find that people are abusing their commit rights to work against building a long term maintainable project, we should handle those on a case by case basis but I think that is a related but separate problem from making sure we have a good public maintenance process.

I don’t know of anyone abusing their power. When I suggest to apply existing rules to everyone for acquiring merge rights, I don’t mean removing anyone’s existing merge rights, it could make sense to grandfather in existing permissions. But for new people or new employees joining the project, getting everyone to acquire merge rights like everyone else in the community, by becoming a core contributor or a maintainer. Everyone could still get permissions like before, but would have to go through the community process/training. If we are going to ask the community as a whole to step up our contribution to the project maintenance, putting ourselves on equal footing proportional to our contribution level would be a good way to align incentives.