[Rock-dev] Who are the package maintainers?

[Steffen Planthaber]

Hi,

At least for the packages on github, aren't the maintainers those with 
write access to the repos?

These are the people who can actually fix issues there (they have to at 
least merge the PRs).

They can also forward issues to the developers of the package.

I think managing a maintainer list additionally to the information  that 
is already on github is not mandantory. Also the list WILL get outdated. 
Who has write access to packages won't.

Actually, only someone with write access can change the manifest.xml to 
update the maintainer itself. I know that having write access is not the 
same as maintainer (which could leave rock development) but having write 
access is a similar responsibility and will never outdate.

I also think it would be rather beneficial to use the manifest.xml ONLY 
for dependencies and put extra information in the readme.md that is 
automatically displayed on github.

Kind regards, Steffen



Am 23.03.2015 um 20:35 schrieb Sylvain Joyeux:
> Just a thought ... Provided that you agree that sending emails out
> makes sense, would it make more sense to send one for fixing the
> manifest.xml and one for the release candidate instead of together. I
> could start sending emails for the manifest.xml right now.
>
> Sylvain
>
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Sylvain Joyeux <bir.sylvain at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Great point, Jakob !
>>
>> Maintainers are identified by the <maintainer></maintainer> field in
>> manifest.xml. I honestly don't know if that particular bit was
>> discussed, it is just what seemed logical (at least for me, as usual
>> YMMV :P), and it is what ROS is using.
>>
>> The email(s) I was planning to send deal with the unassigned
>> maintainers by telling the recipients that they should decide who is
>> the package's maintainer and update the manifest.xml. We're adults,
>> people should not arbitrarily assign themselves if they feel they're
>> not a package's main maintainer.
>>
>> The recipients, in case there is no declared maintainer, are:
>>   1. taken from the <author></author> tags if there was no maintainers tag
>>   2. and fallback to the 50 last commits in the git commit history if
>> there was no author tag
>>
>> Mails are sent by groups of people, meaning that in the case of 2.,
>> all affected people are going to receive a COMMON email, which allows
>> them to discuss the assignation of a maintainer more easily.
>>
>> In addition, I thought about adding a rock_maintainer tag for the
>> packages that are not developed within the Rock infrastructure, as the
>> "go-to" person for that package's integration.
>>
>> What I don't like about the spreadsheet thing is that (1) I really
>> don't want to auto-edit manifest.xml (it loses formatting and
>> comments) and (2) nobody will want to be tasked with editing
>> manifest.xml one by one. So ... I thought that distributing the work
>> is not error-prone but would at least be less painful.
>>
>> Sylvain
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Jakob Schwendner
>> <jakob.schwendner at dfki.de> wrote:
>>> Hey,
>>>
>>> appologies if this was already discussed, but how do we identify who is a
>>> package maintainer?
>>> The original author? What about external packages, that are just
>>> "maintained"? Should we add a maintainer element in the manifest to make it
>>> superclear?
>>> Also, sylvain, it appeared you had created a script to extract the
>>> maintainers. Maybe you could send around the result, and we can start
>>> assigning maintainership somehow (google docs spreadsheet?)
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Jakob
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Rock-dev mailing list
>>> Rock-dev at dfki.de
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  Steffen Planthaber
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