Talk:Developers/Maintainers/Archive 2

I'm trying to identify documentation that could be helpful for someone who'd like to volunteer to become a "maintainer" for something, but I am not seeing anything quite like what I have in mind. Without needing to be too specific, I guess I was expecting to find something that explains expectations on our side, what are some prerequisites, who to reach to to get support, etc.

(pinging @AKlapper (WMF), even.)

I'm not sure if there is anything maintainer specific that's not also generally developer specific (or covered per case, e.g. expressing interest in taking over unmaintained codebases etc)? Do you have anything in mind?

Yes. Taking over an unmaintained codebase. Where would I send someone with such good intentions?

My closest bet is Gerrit/Privilege policy listed on Development guidelines. Though it might not be obvious or explicit enough?

I don't know. I'll recommend that link, and then probably the support desk for any other needs. Thanks.

Hmm, I wouldn't have initially thought of the Support Desk as that's for dealing with the MediaWiki software in my understanding, but more like Communication for general orientation and coming from there probably going to wikitech-l@ mailing list :)

There are a number of components which list former Foundation staff or inactive community members in the "maintainers" column. I'm wondering if they are left there to provide history of who was active in that area in the past or if they are more commonly there because nobody has removed their names?

Specifically I'm thinking about mentions of Brad Jorsch/Anomie, Parent5446, Chad Horohoe, Kaldari, MaxSem, Victor Vasiliev, Michael Dale, and Erik Zachte in the various lists. There may be other inactive folks in the lists as well, but this set of folks jumped out at me today as folks who used to be around in the projects, but who I have not seen in active discussions for months or years.

+1. And for (in theory) WMF "maintained"/"stewarded" codebases, I'd love to see individual names removed.

+1 yes, maintainers and code stewards should be removed when they are no longer active. I guess the defining what "no longer active" is necessary though, especially for volunteer maintainers. Not sure how to measure that. Suggestions? As for staff, that's probably easier - remove them as maintainers, notify them, and them add themselves back if they do plan to continue maintaining things.

I agree that "inactive" is nebulous, but we can probably just pick a random duration that seems long enough to allow for normal wikibreaks. I'll throw out 180 days (~6 months) of no gerrit activity as a starting point for that discussion.

We are really only talking about editing a column on a wiki page here, so there is no long lasting harm for a false positive removal. A lightweight process could be just to BOLDly edit and also leave a talk page message for the user pointing to the diff that removed them and making it clear that they can revert that if the removal was in error.

A related question to go with the policy would be who, if anyone, is in a reasonable position to actually audit this table once or twice a year.

Good point, very little harm indeed :-) I think it makes sense for it to be someone in EngProd. I'll poke Tyler to see if that would be something easy enough to do in RelEng.

I've removed myself from everywhere but also paradoxically added myself as a maintainer for WikiHiero because I seem to be the only human in existence to give a fuck about this extension, at least as far as code reviews go.

Tyler and I talked a bit about this and have some ideas about how to do it. Seems like an interesting project to take on. Looking for it to be an automated process.

@JBranaa (WMF), wondering if you're still considering a process to audit or automate this doc? If not, I think perhaps we should mark it as archived or outdated, so it doesn't mislead. I was reviewing this page as part of doc reviews the Developer Advocacy team has undertaken for a set of key technical docs; see phab:T293793.

@TBurmeister (WMF) this effort has stalled for a variety of reasons, but at this juncture it's our only record so I'd be hesitant to retire it without an alternative in place.

I am wondering if there's a specific process for this: how does one get a maintainer other then just putting there name in here?

@KSiebert (WMF) If there is no maintainer for software deployed on Wikimedia servers, the process would likely be Code stewardship reviews. (But not sure if that answers your question - could you elaborate, maybe? Thanks!)

As an Engineering Manager I want to enable the devs in my team to focus on the work they feel most connected to and some of them mentioned to me recently that they would like to focus on projects that they often work on. So my question is more specifically: how can I help them to transition to gain more responsibility for a part of the codebase?

My quick answer would be by contributing patches to such codebases and by talking to existing maintainers of such codebases.

I find tables easier to read when, instead than being empty, a field says "unassigned" and its cell is red. Not all tables have "unassigned" rather than the empty cell though, and I was wondering if more consistency would be possible/desirable. TY.

We only care about "Unassigned" status for Wikimedia production code.

I am assuming you mean Developers/Maintainers#MediaWiki_core, and only the Code Stewards column.

No, I meant all of the tables except #Operations/systems administration and #Analytics (both of which look quite out of date :-().

I agree that we should use this everywhere, but I don't know enough about those areas to edit.

Should the Portals project (i.e., wikipedia.org) be listed here? If so, where? It's not an extension.

Yeah, good question. it's mostly a service, so I'd list it on Developers/Maintainers#Operations/systems administration.

What James said, and thank you!

Example for Abusefilter: https://wikimedia.biterg.io/app/kibana#/dashboard/95487340-6762-11e9-a198-67126215b112?_a=(query:(language:lucene,query:'repository:%22mediawiki/extensions/AbuseFilter%22'))

Not sure how to do this without lots of manual work though.

Changing repository name in the link should be enough. A simple script should be able to add new column to the table with that data. I didn't test it yet, but it should not be a lot of work. If that's something that would be useful, I can give it a try. I can generate a test page, copying Developers/Maintainers and adding activity data to it. Let me know.

@ZFilipin (WMF) Thanks for the reply! Not sure if it's worth to display a number directIy in a table (one click less but hard to find one criterion which is meaningful enough), and I think that improving Template:MaintainerLinksExtension makes more sense than adding another column - that template already has a "Contributors" item which is quite related to what I'm proposing ("Last code review activity" or something like that)?

Mostly empty, often outdated, and could be merged into Maintainers anyway.

Opinions? Maybe @JBranaa (WMF)?

I'm of two minds about it. It is a historical status for people who are working with stewards/maintainers to be able to take on the work in the future.

But, in reality, if that's happening, that training is most likely a fluid activity and hopefully temporary (with someone either becoming a part of the stewardship group or not). So... as I've typed this out I think I agree that the information gain is minimal.

But I'd still like @JBranaa (WMF)to provide his feedback as he's the owner here and I'm basically over-stepping his work ;)

@Yaron Koren, your name is listed twice under Developers/Maintainers#Key extensions as the primary maintainer of these extensions, with a question mark. If you do keep these extensions up to date, then please remove the question mark. If you don't, then please remove your name completely. Thanks!

Oh, I didn't know about this page. I just update that list.