Hi,
This is also related to the "Coolo needs help thread".
During osc12 we had various discussions related to the topic of getting the distribution out the door and how we can get there within the release schedule that we had agreed to a while back. Part of this discussion are the two sessions I had the opportunity to lead, both are available on youtube opensusetv, if you are interested in this topic please go and watch these sessions, as well as Stephan's session, also on youtube. Unfortunately we did not have video equipment in the BoF session.
The basic proposal is, and this received general agreement at osc12, that we will move toward changing the model as proposed in the session. This implies the following:
- In the web UI one will no longer see inherited project maintainers on the package page, only the "true" package maintainers. (Inherited "maintainers" will be hidden in an expandable tree)
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel projects that feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will list packages that have more than 5 maintainers and try to encourage maintainers from those packages (to get the number to 5) to take on packages that need help.
- We want to clean up the devel project maintainer list to a ratio of 10/500 packages with a max of 25. ~ In many cases package maintainers in a given project do not care about all the other packages in the project, yet they are on the project maintainer list. ~ Also many people have their Hermes notifications disabled as they get too many messages about packages they do not care, hopefully with the changes more people will re-enable their Hermes notifications (more on this below)
- We would like to see a notification on the package page if the package fails to build in factory
- Would like to see package build status information on the factory status page about the status of the package in it's devel project.
- Having the monitor page and the status page presented in the current form is confusing, we need to somehow merge the information.
- It would be really nice if there were some kind of policy engine that could enforce the "no more than 5 per package" and the "no more than 25 project maintainers" policies. ~ now OBS is not just for openSUSE, thus this cannot be hard coded into the OBS code, thus this is potentially a lot of work.
- We would like to have some kind of rating system on the devel projects
- We will produce guidelines for package and product maintainers outlining what is expected. ~ These guidelines are not hard rules, but provide help to new people stepping in to define the role they are comfortable with. There appears to be a problem that the complete void of guidelines in this area leads to paralysis and people just do not know what to do if they want to help. We have documents how to package, these guidelines will be a hopefully short list of "what is expected".
These are the rough outlines of the "plan". Obviously there is work to be done and the OBS team already has plenty to do. It is up to me to document in more detail the requirements/use case before a potential timeline can be developed. I will also start a wiki page attempting to define the various roles in the devel process and then opening that up for discussion once the basics are in place.
Now to a couple of counter points.
- Yes we will step on some people's toe, sorry. Meaning if you get removed as project maintainer from a devel project and you really really want to be a project maintainer you are probably not going to be happy. Please do not take it personal and get yourself added back to the project. Preferably you would find one of the project maintainers that remained, by chance and chance alone, and get that person to drop of the list. Chances are you will find someone willing to "make space for you" ~ Sorry, but this process has to be somewhat arbitrary due to the large number on the various devel projects. ~ Please be not offended, there is no vicious intent, just the intent to help the project grow and scale better.
- Yes, the "rules" are changing, and if you maintain a package that is also in factory there will now be some expectations ~ In the end we all should have the same goal, create a quality distro in the time frame we promise, thus this should really not be a big deal
Before I close this rather long e-mail (sorry) I have a kind of survey question. I would like to have the hermes settings of package maintainers reset "automatically" as we move through the house keeping project such that package maintainers get notification of build failures of their packages. I realize many people have these turned off today, but again, this is probably due to the number of notifications due to the project maintainer mails that most people do not care about.
OK, before I write another couple of pages about this subject I'll stop here.
Thanks for your attention, please no flaming, bitching and moaning. Great ideas and help are welcome.
Later, Robert
On 26 October 2012 09:16, Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com wrote:
- Yes we will step on some people's toe, sorry. Meaning if you get removed
as project maintainer from a devel project and you really really want to be a project maintainer you are probably not going to be happy. Please do not take it personal and get yourself added back to the project. Preferably you would find one of the project maintainers that remained, by chance and chance alone, and get that person to drop of the list. Chances are you will find someone willing to "make space for you" ~ Sorry, but this process has to be somewhat arbitrary due to the large number on the various devel projects. ~ Please be not offended, there is no vicious intent, just the intent to help the project grow and scale better.
Meaning that if you don't care about a project you are a maintainer of... NOW it would be a good moment to remove yourself from the list.
Meaning that if you don't care about a project you are a maintainer of... NOW it would be a good moment to remove yourself from the list.
I dropped myself off filesystems, games, Linux-PAM. Now, it's your turn :)
* Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com [2012-10-26 10:16]:
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel
projects that feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will list
Not sure if I understand that right, a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers "needs help"? If so, that seems completely arbitrary and even absurd, as this totally depends on the complexity of the package and existing maintainer and probably reinforces the very problem you're trying to solve (nobody having a sense of ownership and feeling responsible) in a lot of cases.
Apart from that I'm missing some kind of more formal orphaning process from your proposal, I think that's part of the issue when maintainers go missing and a package becomes unmaintained without anyone noticing (at least until it fails to build on Factory). We should encourage people to announce it when they are no longer able to maintain a package (which rarely happens) and have some process for orphaning by non-maintainers when a maintainer becomes unresponsive.
On 26 October 2012 09:16, Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com wrote:
- We want to clean up the devel project maintainer list to a ratio of 10/500
packages with a max of 25.
What about project "bugowner"s? Why is not every maintainer a bugowner? There will be limits for bugowners? I just added myself as bugowner of multimedia:libs so I would get added CC to the bug reports. But I tested and I actually get assigned to them and sbrabec, the previously only bugowner, gets CC. I see no way to change this, it seems to be related to the nickname.
It seems to me that every maintainer should get added CC to the bug reports. If there is any "bugowner" role at all it should be just to specify a "main maintainer" that would be the one that gets them assigned.
On Friday 2012-10-26 11:24, Cristian Morales Vega wrote:
On 26 October 2012 09:16, Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com wrote:
- We want to clean up the devel project maintainer list to a ratio of 10/500
packages with a max of 25.
What about project "bugowner"s? Why is not every maintainer a bugowner?
I like how bugowner is separate from the maintainer; that way, I can designate someone else to be the "first-level support" person for bugzilla entries. Like, in X11:RemoteDesktop:x2go.
On Friday 2012-10-26 10:16, Robert Schweikert wrote:
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel projects that
feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers.
A package should not strictly need five people to be considered maintained. If it did, we would be back to "someone else will probably do it" type of problem. Especially for the smaller packages.
~ In many cases package maintainers in a given project do not care about all the other packages in the project, yet they are on the project maintainer list.
Yes; this is because the prj maintainer is the one equipped with the accept-new-package power.
~ Also many people have their Hermes notifications disabled as they get too many messages about packages they do not care, hopefully with the changes more people will re-enable their Hermes notifications (more on this below)
Conversely, Hermes also suppresses certain SRs: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739335
On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 04:16:18AM -0400, Robert Schweikert wrote:
Hi,
Hi Robert,
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel
projects that feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will lista [snip]
I assume that **most** of packages has less than 5 maintainers! Personally, I'd not limit the lower bound - something between 1-5 seems to be OK. For biggest numbers, OBS has to be cleanup, or packages has to be moved to an another devel project.
packages that have more than 5 maintainers and try to encourage maintainers from those packages (to get the number to 5) to take on packages that need help.
- We want to clean up the devel project maintainer list to a ratio
of 10/500 packages with a max of 25. ~ In many cases package maintainers in a given project do not care about all the other packages in the project, yet they are on the project maintainer list. ~ Also many people have their Hermes notifications disabled as they get too many messages about packages they do not care, hopefully with the changes more people will re-enable their Hermes notifications (more on this below)
- We would like to see a notification on the package page if the
package fails to build in factory
- Would like to see package build status information on the factory
status page about the status of the package in it's devel project.
- Having the monitor page and the status page presented in the
current form is confusing, we need to somehow merge the information.
- It would be really nice if there were some kind of policy engine
that could enforce the "no more than 5 per package" and the "no more than 25 project maintainers" policies.
25 people per project (given the huge number of projects we have) seems to be as a big number! Do you have an example, where it can make a sense?
So can we be more strict, lower the default numbers and increase them upon the request? I assume lower numbers can fit a majority of devel projects we have.
~ now OBS is not just for openSUSE, thus this cannot be hard coded into the OBS code, thus this is potentially a lot of work.
We would like to have some kind of rating system on the devel projects
We will produce guidelines for package and product maintainers
outlining what is expected. ~ These guidelines are not hard rules, but provide help to new people stepping in to define the role they are comfortable with. There appears to be a problem that the complete void of guidelines in this area leads to paralysis and people just do not know what to do if they want to help. We have documents how to package, these guidelines will be a hopefully short list of "what is expected".
These are the rough outlines of the "plan". Obviously there is work to be done and the OBS team already has plenty to do. It is up to me to document in more detail the requirements/use case before a potential timeline can be developed. I will also start a wiki page attempting to define the various roles in the devel process and then opening that up for discussion once the basics are in place.
Now to a couple of counter points.
- Yes we will step on some people's toe, sorry. Meaning if you get
removed as project maintainer from a devel project and you really really want to be a project maintainer you are probably not going to be happy. Please do not take it personal and get yourself added back to the project. Preferably you would find one of the project maintainers that remained, by chance and chance alone, and get that person to drop of the list. Chances are you will find someone willing to "make space for you" ~ Sorry, but this process has to be somewhat arbitrary due to the large number on the various devel projects. ~ Please be not offended, there is no vicious intent, just the intent to help the project grow and scale better.
On the other hand, users have to be informed about the change via email, which will give them needed information and describe steps needed for getting the maintainership back if they're still interested ...
- Yes, the "rules" are changing, and if you maintain a package that
is also in factory there will now be some expectations ~ In the end we all should have the same goal, create a quality distro in the time frame we promise, thus this should really not be a big deal
Before I close this rather long e-mail (sorry) I have a kind of survey question. I would like to have the hermes settings of package maintainers reset "automatically" as we move through the house
... or how to turn the hermes off again ;-)
keeping project such that package maintainers get notification of build failures of their packages. I realize many people have these turned off today, but again, this is probably due to the number of notifications due to the project maintainer mails that most people do not care about.
OK, before I write another couple of pages about this subject I'll stop here.
Thanks for your attention, please no flaming, bitching and moaning. Great ideas and help are welcome.
OK, so there are my few cents
## Make default maximum numbers lower and increase them per-project/per-request
## http://s.kulow.org/fs-$user is awesome!
Please add such link to the main page of webui (My work?). And continue with reminder emails
## Make the process of changing devel project easier
atm, you have to 1) sr to the new project 2) wait-till-accepted 3) issue changedevelrequest 4) wait-till-accepted 5) merge things from old and new devel project together 6) issue the deleterequest to Factory 7) issue the deleterequest to the old devel project
which is horrible and most of people won't do it
My proposal is that changedevelrequest can do all the work internally, once went through normal checkin process (review-team(?), factory-maintainers)
Or let coolo write the script do it all ;-)
## Lower the number of devel projects in OBS
The good start is to sort them with a number of project maintainers - those are propably pointless and shall be killed. Yes, I'm targetting the Base:System.
I did a bit shell scripting and those are the "worst" projects
Base:System;56 Education;42 devel:libraries:c_c++;42 network;30 YaST:Head;29 server:mail;27 science;27 network:utilities;25 server:monitoring;24 security;24
The complete list is attached, but it's obvious, that 25 limit is too high
## Monitor
We need to monitor an activity of maintainers to check, if they are still active or not. So have a list of projects/packages did not accepting requests for a long time, list of packages are not touched for a long time and so - but this is probably something for a limited number of eyes.
Regards Michal Vyskocil
On Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:47:12 +0200, Michal Vyskocil mvyskocil@suse.cz wrote:
I did a bit shell scripting and those are the "worst" projects
Base:System;56 devel:libraries:c_c++;42
I'd gladly give up the maintainership for most projects *if* there was another way of acquiring the right to create new packages. For instance it would be more complicated to do the package split for util-linux without that right.
We need to monitor an activity of maintainers to check, if they are still active or not. So have a list of projects/packages did not accepting requests for a long time, list of packages are not touched for a long time and so - but this is probably something for a limited number of eyes.
+1 as it is IMHO vital to ring a bell when things like submit requests are silently rotting away.
Philipp
Am 26.10.2012 20:26, schrieb Philipp Thomas:
On Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:47:12 +0200, Michal Vyskocil mvyskocil@suse.cz wrote:
I did a bit shell scripting and those are the "worst" projects
Base:System;56 devel:libraries:c_c++;42
I'd gladly give up the maintainership for most projects *if* there was another way of acquiring the right to create new packages. For instance it would be more complicated to do the package split for util-linux without that right.
With that model there will be responsive project maintainers who can help you accepting SRs. So you split util-linux in your branch and then submit to the main project.
Greetings, Stephan
On 26 October 2012 09:16, Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com wrote:
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel projects that
feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will list packages that have more than 5 maintainers and try to encourage maintainers from those packages (to get the number to 5) to take on packages that need help.
I guess during feature freeze it's not the best moment to start playing with maintainership rights. But there is any progress about all this "Maintainer model clean up"? I am specially interested in those lists you mentioned.
On 01/23/2013 09:45 AM, Cristian Morales Vega wrote:
On 26 October 2012 09:16, Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com wrote:
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel projects that
feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will list packages that have more than 5 maintainers and try to encourage maintainers from those packages (to get the number to 5) to take on packages that need help.
I guess during feature freeze it's not the best moment to start playing with maintainership rights. But there is any progress about all this "Maintainer model clean up"?
Yes, there is progress. On a large number of projects we have successfully reduced the number of project maintainers, for example in devel:languages:perl we are down to 12 project maintainers.
The interface changes to hide the project maintainers for individual packages have not been implemented, but there is a bug report #791088
I am specially interested in those lists you mentioned.
I wrote a script to generate the lists and it mostly worked. The script appears to trigger a bug, filed as 791103. I also sent the script to Stephan for review and help, but obviously until 12.3 is out this will have to wait.
I am hoping that after the release is done the bug preventing the script from running will get fixed and we can move forward with this. Ideally I will be able to give a lightning talk about this at oSC13 and show the statistics and report on the progress.
Later, Robert
Am 23.01.2013 16:06, schrieb Robert Schweikert:
On 01/23/2013 09:45 AM, Cristian Morales Vega wrote:
On 26 October 2012 09:16, Robert Schweikert rjschwei@suse.com wrote:
- We will collect information about all packages in all devel
projects that feed factory. We will generate a list of packages that have no maintainer, and a list of packages that need help, i.e. a package that has fewer than 5 maintainers. In addition we will list packages that have more than 5 maintainers and try to encourage maintainers from those packages (to get the number to 5) to take on packages that need help.
I guess during feature freeze it's not the best moment to start playing with maintainership rights. But there is any progress about all this "Maintainer model clean up"?
Yes, there is progress. On a large number of projects we have successfully reduced the number of project maintainers, for example in devel:languages:perl we are down to 12 project maintainers.
Exactly. Besides the automated approach Rob is working on (below), there's also a manual way to participate:
If a submit request to a particular project stalls for a longer period of time it's sane to ask all the maintainers if they're still interested. Everyone that does not reply looses his rights on the project. Of course it can't hurt to ask here if anyone's interested to take over.
The interface changes to hide the project maintainers for individual packages have not been implemented, but there is a bug report #791088
I am specially interested in those lists you mentioned.
I wrote a script to generate the lists and it mostly worked. The script appears to trigger a bug, filed as 791103. I also sent the script to Stephan for review and help, but obviously until 12.3 is out this will have to wait.
I am hoping that after the release is done the bug preventing the script from running will get fixed and we can move forward with this. Ideally I will be able to give a lightning talk about this at oSC13 and show the statistics and report on the progress.
Maybe it is worth mentioning that the overall goal is not to reduce the number of maintainers or kick anyone out. To the contrary, we want to have maintainers that active and caring and willing to advance the devel projects (and thus Factory). Getting responses to your requests in time (positive or negative) and a general vision for the devel project are surely healthy ingredients to attract further contributions. Keeping the number of build errors low and the number of packages increasing and there versions current are too.
-
Cristian Morales Vega -
Guido Berhoerster -
Jan Engelhardt -
Michal Vyskocil -
Philipp Thomas -
Robert Schweikert -
Sascha Peilicke -
Stephan Kulow