Adopt-a-plugin!

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Daniel Beck

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Oct 5, 2015, 11:05:04 AM10/5/15
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Hi everyone,

One problem that's been apparent for a while is that maintainers appear to lose interest in their plugins. While we're set up to handle this situation and can appoint other maintainers, it seems that more plugins become stagnant over time. My hypothesis is that users may not be aware that this is a problem, or that they could be the solution.

My suggestion is to point users, many of who are potential maintainers, to plugins that haven't been maintained in a while -- not to discourage their use, but encourage contacting us to be made plugin maintainer.

The first step here is to mark plugins as up for adoption. We could use the plugin's wiki page, as entry point to all plugin's online documentation, for that. The plugin info box at the top could include a banner that with a short explanation that the plugin is part of this initiative, linking to a wiki page with more information and how to take over plugin ownership. Plugin authors could do this as well if they've lost interest and would like someone else to take over -- before they're abandoning it.

As a second step, we could create an index of all affected plugins, allowing interested devs to browse a list of plugins for which they could take over maintainership.

WYDT?

Daniel

Slide

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Oct 5, 2015, 11:10:38 AM10/5/15
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+1

In addition, I'd like to work on additional plugins, so being aware of ones that need help would be great.


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Manuel Jesús Recena Soto

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Oct 5, 2015, 11:40:24 AM10/5/15
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Richard Bywater

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Oct 5, 2015, 2:02:50 PM10/5/15
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Sounds an interesting idea and has merit. Only question I'd have is what constitutes a stagnant plugin? I imagine there are plug-ins out there that haven't had any changes made recently as there hasn't been any need to?

Richard.


Daniel Beck

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Oct 5, 2015, 2:30:20 PM10/5/15
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On 05.10.2015, at 20:02, Richard Bywater <ric...@byh2o.com> wrote:

> Sounds an interesting idea and has merit. Only question I'd have is what constitutes a stagnant plugin? I imagine there are plug-ins out there that haven't had any changes made recently as there hasn't been any need to?

As I see it, a plugin qualifying for adoption is one that isn't actively being maintained, so it could even be plugins with recent changes by people who don't consider themselves real maintainers of the plugin (basically the drive-by maintenance that is enabled through our contribution policy).

Some indicators that a plugin needs a new "parent":
- no recent development activity
- no recent releases
- nobody responds to issues in JIRA, possibly not even a default assignee
- ?

This cannot be automated, so I have no thresholds for these, but we're not aiming for 100% coverage. We can start at the top X plugins and the rest can be added by maintainers looking to stop, or whenever someone who knows about this program notices the above.

We have email addresses from every (former) maintainer thanks to the account app, so we could even send a one-time mail asking about maintainership here. We'd probably do this anyway once someone shows up who wants to do this to get confirmation, so it's not particularly spammy IMO.

Baptiste Mathus

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Oct 5, 2015, 2:31:43 PM10/5/15
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+1.

@Richard IMO Stephen's proposal was both simple enough and effective to detect inactive plugin.

TL;DR for others:

* Open an automatic fake PR on the plugin when detected as a inactive plugin candidate
* Either the maintainer answers something like "I'M STILL ALIVE" (or something else)
* Or no answer and after x days, then mark inactive

TODO IIRC : 
* define a simple process to go out of that state when back to active




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Baptiste <Batmat> MATHUS - http://batmat.net
Sauvez un arbre,
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Baptiste Mathus

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Oct 5, 2015, 2:32:41 PM10/5/15
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Woops, forgot to include the associated thread link for reference: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/jenkinsci-dev/Ih0RviQ0G90/NmoVJQ1j6NAJ

Robert Sandell

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Oct 5, 2015, 4:32:53 PM10/5/15
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+1 I have some plugins that I no longer have any interest in maintaining and have sent  emails to the dev list in the past mentioning that they are up for grabs, but who looks in the archive for that before posting a ticket or pr. Better have some uniform indication in the wiki page instead.

/B

Oleg Nenashev

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Oct 5, 2015, 5:25:13 PM10/5/15
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I have 1-year-old drafts of Confluence macros for such thing.
Hopefully I'll find it in my archives

понедельник, 5 октября 2015 г., 23:32:53 UTC+3 пользователь Robert Sandell написал:

jieryn

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Oct 6, 2015, 7:49:58 AM10/6/15
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https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Plugin+Report+Card

I wrote a backend job that produces a report of plugins which
"probably" are neglected. Neglected in this context being a plugin
with required core that is very old.
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/3eb52351-83e1-4017-bc5f-242e27dde1a5%40googlegroups.com.

Daniel Beck

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Oct 16, 2015, 10:37:35 AM10/16/15
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On 06.10.2015, at 13:49, jieryn <jie...@gmail.com> wrote:

> https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Plugin+Report+Card
>
> I wrote a backend job that produces a report of plugins which
> "probably" are neglected. Neglected in this context being a plugin
> with required core that is very old.

This could well be a deliberate compatibility choice for some, but at least old versions that don't even compile with JDK 7 anymore this could be useful.

Daniel Beck

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Oct 16, 2015, 10:39:41 AM10/16/15
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I set up the wiki page here:

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Adopt+a+Plugin

Feel free to improve it!

PR to the (Confluence) plugin info plugin is here, nothing spectacular:
https://github.com/jenkinsci/backend-jenkins-plugin-info-plugin/pull/6

Please suggest message changes if you don't like it.

Daniel

Baptiste Mathus

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Oct 19, 2015, 2:44:48 PM10/19/15
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LGTM.
Hence IIUC only one plugin currently up for adoption right?

-- Baptiste

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Daniel Beck

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Oct 19, 2015, 2:54:55 PM10/19/15
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Yes, but you can nominate any plugin for this by adding the label. I'll later go through the more popular plugins to populate the list.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CANWgJS6iF5QHr%2Bd2YQ4W6gd-GsOdEax5_-TXaFu8HwvBp6r4yQ%40mail.gmail.com.

Daniel Beck

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Oct 19, 2015, 7:25:55 PM10/19/15
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On 19.10.2015, at 20:54, Daniel Beck <m...@beckweb.net> wrote:

> I'll later go through the more popular plugins to populate the list.

I added the first batch of plugins.

Check out the list @ https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Adopt+a+Plugin#AdoptaPlugin-Whichpluginsarecurrentlyupforadoption%3F

None of them have been released in two years, but all have 3500+ installs (and nothing recent in the Git repo). These aren't the only ones with these properties, but I'll ask the possible maintainers of the others before adding them.

I have a giant spreadsheet with the plugins, their install counts and last release date and will work down the list by popularity -- but don't let that stop you from adding other plugins you know should have a new maintainer: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Adopt+a+Plugin?nocache#AdoptaPlugin-HowcanImarkapluginforadoption%3F

Slide

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Oct 19, 2015, 11:15:21 PM10/19/15
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How is https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/SCP+plugin different from the Publish Over SCP Plugin? Maybe as part of this exercise, we should look at deprecating some of the plugins?

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Oleg Nenashev

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Oct 20, 2015, 1:39:22 AM10/20/15
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What do we do with plugins belonging to Kohsuke? I doubt he has any time to maintain them.

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Manuel Jesús Recena Soto

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Oct 20, 2015, 2:43:18 AM10/20/15
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Hello,

(reply in line)

2015-10-20 5:14 GMT+02:00 Slide <slide...@gmail.com>:
> How is https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/SCP+plugin different from
> the Publish Over SCP Plugin? Maybe as part of this exercise, we should look
> at deprecating some of the plugins?

I agree to review the "potencial" deprecated plugins.
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CAPiUgVeYxZmTSHjOTvKhg7vp1uDeSO-a7p-jMmaJ%2BhtX%3D%3D9eog%40mail.gmail.com.
>
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



Daniel Beck

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Oct 20, 2015, 4:35:22 AM10/20/15
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On 20.10.2015, at 05:14, Slide <slide...@gmail.com> wrote:

> How is https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/SCP+plugin different from the Publish Over SCP Plugin? Maybe as part of this exercise, we should look at deprecating some of the plugins?

Makes sense. Locks and Latches is another such candidate on my "inactive" list. In general, we need to start following through on proposed deprecations. However I suggest you start another thread for that.

Daniel Beck

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Oct 20, 2015, 4:38:08 AM10/20/15
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On 20.10.2015, at 07:39, Oleg Nenashev <o.v.ne...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What do we do with plugins belonging to Kohsuke? I doubt he has any time to maintain them.

The "developer" field isn't really all that reliable, so how you'd identify them? Once you're looking at recent commits, it makes relatively little difference who the recent committer is. However if KK is the most recent dev, I'd just not ask the developer before labeling their wiki page…

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