Sent from my iPhone
> On Mar 7, 2023, at 3:34 PM, P. Taylor Goetz <ptgo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Mar 7, 2023, at 6:36 AM, Enrico Olivelli <eolive...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Websites tend to quickly become obsolete about this kind of thing,
>> because really
>> nobody takes care of its own "status" on a project, or that it is
>> "visible" on the website.
>> It is not for the benefit of anyone.
>
> I would beg to differ here. It would show who’s contributed to the project,
> and their current activity status. It preserves, rather than rewrites, the
> history of the project.
We have such a list and there is “bit rot”
>
> If it’s a burden to update a text file, then automate the task. Git history,
> JIRA history, and mailing list history are all preserved by ASF
> infrastructure. There are plenty of data sources available to mine to
> determine an “activity level”. The ASF already has a bunch of tools that give
> this type of 30k foot view.
I am familiar with many of the tools. I’ve worked on the massive Python program
that evaluates the incubator podlings. This ask is a rather large undertaking.
Certain parts of GitHub activity are hard to do. There is a lot of lists to
correlate like the mapping between apacheid, names, GitHub id, and extra
emails. One would need to learn the structure of whimsy’s ldap files, pony
mail’s api, GitHub’s api, etcetera. This is not a hand wave. It’s real work. It
would likely require ASF member privileges.
If it were pursued then I would be more interested in contributions from
non-committers.
>
>
>>
>> Also when you become "inactive" you are for sure not interested in
>> updating the website, because you slowly
>> lose interest in the project :-)
>
> Again, automate it if you feel it’s an undue burden.
>
>>
>> Everybody (should) participate as an individual, what's the benefit of
>> having you listed on the website ?
>
> I’ll offer a hypothetical of which there are plenty of real-world examples:
>
> Suppose I started an open source project “FooBar” that gained a decent
> following and OSS community. Then donated it to the ASF to ensure both the
> community and project would have a chance to continue, even without me. I go
> through the Incubator to propose a new project and it gets accepted. The
> community does the hard work of graduating from the Incubator and it becomes
> a TLP “Apache FooBar”. Now that it’s, according to the ASF guidelines, an
> active, sustainable community, I decide to pull back a little to pursue other
> opportunities.
>
> Should the record of those contributions be removed from the project website?
> What if a PMC member dies? Should the record of contributions be removed?
>
>>
>> I really remember the first time I was invited as a committer in an
>> ASF, I felt really proud of myself,
>> and also seeing myself listed in the main pom.xml of the project or in
>> the list of committers was cool.
>> So this is great for new contributors or in order to praise the
>> efforts of someone who spent so much
>> time in the community in order to be asked to join the group of people
>> responsible for the project.
>
> Yes, for many being invited as a Committer/PMC Member is a proud moment and
> significant achievement. Why should it have an expiration date?
>
>> But after some time, when you participate in an OSS community, and you
>> really care about the project,
>> you don't care if you are listed here or there.
>
> Some people do and have every right to.
>
> If Linus Torvalds decides to no longer partificipate in Linux development,
> should the Linux Foundation remove him from the list of contributors?
>
>>
>> Regarding the "themes" on which someone could be "more expert" or not.
>> This is also a piece of information that becomes obsolete.
>> The community is dynamic, people who "knew" well something in the past
>> but maybe they are no more up-to-date now.
>>
>> What's the goal ? To say Foo Bar is the "Pulsar Schema Registry expert" ?
>>
>> Personally I won't feel good to say that I am "the" expert for X, Y,
>> Z, even if there are a few places in which I have spent
>> days of work and I made substantial contributions (or new features
>> initially contributed by myself).
>>
>> If you want to reach out to someone expert on a piece of code you use
>> the GH UI and see the latest commits (of "git log")
>> or search into the mailing list archives or in the GH issues and you
>> will find the same names around a given topic.
>
> I don’t have a strong opinion on this and would leave it to the Pulsar dev
> community to sort out.
About 15 years ago the ASF asked projects to remove @author tags from source
because it was blocking contributions. People were treating authors like code
owners. I agree with Enrico here.
>
> I am passionate about preserving history (a recurring theme within the ASF).
> Removing people from contributor lists because they’ve since moved on to
> “make the project look more active” rubs me the wrong way and, IMHO, betrays
> the spirit of the ASF.
>
>> If we want to list the PMC members/committers I suggest building
>> something automated that simply shows the list.
This part is easy as we can make use of the yaml that whimsy.Apache.org creates.
>
> Go for iit! We software developers seem to have a knack of automating tedious
> tasks. ;)
.
>
>> Enrico
>
> -Taylor
Dave
>
