Dear Bastien,
Thank you for your well-thought-out reply. With regards to the question your email ends with: > What do you think? Would you be willing to take this role? > If not, that's perfectly okay, I'll send a call for help. The short answer is "yes, mostly". The long answer follows :P I also think that regardless it would be good to put out a call asking if anyone else is interested/willing to do this: I'm going to be busy sometimes, a reduced workload is clearly preferable, and less should slip through the cracks :) Bastien <b...@gnu.org> writes: > Dear Timothy, > > thanks for raising this points so carefully, they are important. > > I see three distinct problems: > > A. The lack of response and/or follow-up when people contribute by > sending bug reports or patches on the list. This is something I'm definitely happy to help with. > B. The lack of maintainance on documenting the contribution process > and the correct expectations for future contributors. I'm happy to document this, but I don't know what expectations should be set. I think this is a matter that should be decided by consensus among the current/active maintainers. > C. The inherent difficulty to move the Org codebase forward. I think there are some things that can be done to improve the structure and system of contribution/development, but I'm waiting on external developments and it will take a fair bit of my time to properly implement a prototype. ETA 1-2 years. > I won't comment on (C). For (A) and (B), I suggest appointing a > "contributor steward" with these responsibilities: > > 1. Maintain updates.orgmode.org (i.e. make sure it is accurate.) > 2. Maintain the documentation for contributors. > 3. Help contributors enhancing their patches. > 4. Try to reproduce bugs (and confirm them for updates.orgmode.org) > 5. Make sure patch contributors are not left with no answer. > > You started (1), which is really appreciated. I'll try to keep this up :) > Tim and others mentioned (2), and that's certainly needed too. See my comment on (B) above. > (3) has historically been the role of the maintainer and of the core > contributors, but helping with this is very welcome: knowing the doc > at https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contribute.html by heart, educating > contributors on the commit messages, etc. This all helps. I can give this a go :) > (4) is perhaps the most daunting task: I even think we could have > someone only dedicated to this very important task. Just count the > number of times Nicolas says "I cannot reproduce this." Each time, > there is a real bug that is *not* fixed... Mmmm, even if I say I'm willing to do this, I suspect this is something I'd by nature push off enough that I'd frequently forget about this 😅. > (5) is not about systematically welcome patch submitters with a > message (that would be annoying) but to monitor updates.orgmode.org > and decide what to do with a patch that didn't receive feedback: > either say thanks and ping the list for why you think the patch > deserves more attention, or thanks and dismiss the patch, or another > answer. This is how I see this two. As I indicated at the start, I'm happy to do this, but I think a second person would help ensure that nobody slips through the cracks. -- Timothy
