Outdated peer list

[Soledad Penadés]

Hello friendly devtoolers!

I was talking to people from another team last week and they told me
that if they found an issue in our code they would try to reach some of
the peers first. I asked "which peers"? and they told me they use this list:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/All#DevTools

Which is outdated.

How do we update this? I'm not familiar with the 'protocol' in this
case. Do we just edit the page since it's a wiki?

I would assume that the people listed here are the peers:
https://devtools-html.github.io/#people-and-modules

Is this correct?

Thank you

sole

--
http://soledadpenades.com

[Mike Hoye]

On 6/21/17 7:26 AM, Soledad Penadés wrote:
>
> How do we update this? I'm not familiar with the 'protocol' in this
> case. Do we just edit the page since it's a wiki?

Protocol to changing the module owners and peers list is

- Announce your intent to change to the Governance mailing list. Include
what you're changing it to and why.
- Wait a week.
- If there are no objections, make the change. If there are, back off
and address the objections before continuing.

A statement of support from the existing module owners and peers for
that change is helpful, if they're available.


- mhoye

[Patrick Brosset]

Yes this is indeed the official list of owners and peers for the DevTools
module as per the Mozilla module system.

There are many peers as you can see. The list contains people who we have
made peers in the past. Typically this happened when people started to make
regular contributions to the code and demonstrated knowledge and ability to
do code reviews for changes from other people.
This list therefore contains Mozilla employees working on DevTools, as well
regular contributors, but also employees who happen to know a specific part
of DevTools but are not on the team, or who used to work on the team but
moved on to other things. Often times, these people will still do reviews
every now and again, and still have specific knowledge that make them be on
that peers list.

Joe and I are the current owners of the module, and we've updated that list
a couple of times in the past to make sure it was up to date.
It looks like it needs updating once more, sorry about that. I'll make sure
that's done.

I would assume that the people listed here are the peers:
> https://devtools-html.github.io/#people-and-modules
>

So, that's another list. Owners and peers of the DevTools module are one
thing, but this list is another thing, it gives names of people to contact
about a particular part of DevTools. For instance, if person A currently
works on the console, then having a place in our documentation that says
people should contact person A for help about the console is a good idea.
The peers list doesn't go into the details of who works on what, and
DevTools is a rather large module. So I can see both of the lists being
useful, but we should probably consolidate and have just one.

The previous paragraph on that github page though (the "People" section,
with photos) seems sort of wrong though, I guess we could simply remove it
altogether.

I hope that helps understand.

Patrick

> _______________________________________________
> dev-developer-tools mailing list
> dev-devel...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-developer-tools
>

[J. Ryan Stinnett]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 9:41 AM, Patrick Brosset <pbro...@mozilla.com>
wrote:

> The previous paragraph on that github page though (the "People" section,
> with photos) seems sort of wrong though, I guess we could simply remove it
> altogether.
>

Yeah, the people section is misleading... It's based on who has set their
GitHub organization membership visibility to public, which appears to be
manual action each person has to take separately. (If you are a member and
want to do so, go to https://github.com/orgs/devtools-html/people, find
your name, change "Private" to "Public".)

Anyway, might make sense to just remove it...?

- Ryan

[Soledad Penadés]

On 21/06/2017 15:41, Patrick Brosset wrote:
> Yes this is indeed the official list of owners and peers for the
> DevTools module as per the Mozilla module system.
>

Aha! I wasn't sure if they were meant to represent "the most senior
people in DevTools, per area, right now"

> There are many peers as you can see. The list contains people who we
> have made peers in the past. Typically this happened when people
> started to make regular contributions to the code and demonstrated
> knowledge and ability to do code reviews for changes from other people.
> This list therefore contains Mozilla employees working on DevTools, as
> well regular contributors, but also employees who happen to know a
> specific part of DevTools but are not on the team, or who used to work
> on the team but moved on to other things. Often times, these people
> will still do reviews every now and again, and still have specific
> knowledge that make them be on that peers list.

I understand that... but I was wondering whether these people would be
still (glad | expected) to respond to questions on the code. Not even
former employees, but current employees who haven't worked on it for a
[potentially long] while.

To give some more context, this discussion was motivated by the need to
contact peers urgently in the case of a security vulnerability. Do we
expect people who might not be familiar with the code anymore to respond
to these requests?

>
> I would assume that the people listed here are the peers:
> https://devtools-html.github.io/#people-and-modules
> <https://devtools-html.github.io/#people-and-modules>
>
> So, that's another list. Owners and peers of the DevTools module are
> one thing, but this list is another thing, it gives names of people to
> contact about a particular part of DevTools. For instance, if person A
> currently works on the console, then having a place in our
> documentation that says people should contact person A for help about
> the console is a good idea.
> The peers list doesn't go into the details of who works on what, and
> DevTools is a rather large module. So I can see both of the lists
> being useful, but we should probably consolidate and have just one.

Following this explanation, I can't decide whether it makes more sense
to have just one list or two.

On one hand having a "one single point of truth" is easier, but on the
other hand it looks like the owners/peers list is a bit of a
ceremonial/merit thing that might not be directly connected with the
actual day to day work, and you still need the 'people who work on this
right now' list if you need help with a specific aspect of devtools. So:
I don't know! :-)

>
> The previous paragraph on that github page though (the "People"
> section, with photos) seems sort of wrong though, I guess we could
> simply remove it altogether.

As jryans answered, they are the members of the devtools-html
organisation who have set their membership to public. There's an issue
to get more people to set it to public (if they so want, I'd add...):
https://github.com/devtools-html/devtools-html.github.com/issues/10

>
> I hope that helps understand.
>

Yeah! thanks!

[Mike Hoye]

On 6/21/17 11:56 AM, Soledad Penadés wrote:
> Following this explanation, I can't decide whether it makes more sense
> to have just one list or two.
>
> On one hand having a "one single point of truth" is easier, but on the
> other hand it looks like the owners/peers list is a bit of a
> ceremonial/merit thing that might not be directly connected with the
> actual day to day work, and you still need the 'people who work on
> this right now' list if you need help with a specific aspect of
> devtools. So: I don't know! :-)

No-longer-directly-involved peers are considered "peers emeritus" in the
Module system, and you definitely want a single authoritative source here.

- mhoye