Community plugin maintainers initiative

[Mark Waite]

At the Jenkins Contributor Summit, the maintenance breakout session identified a key problem.  Many plugins need improvements but the maintainers are unavailable, unresponsive, or no longer involved.  Pull requests that are submitted sit idle without any response.

I've created a Google Doc  that proposes an improvement.  It introduces the concept of plugin maintenance projects that need changes across multiple plugins.  The document proposes a new group, community plugin maintainers, with permissions to merge improvements to plugins without requiring that they adopt the plugin.

I'd like your comments and questions in the  Google Doc .  Comments are welcome in the Google Doc.  Replies to this mail message are also welcome.

Most of the steps of the proposed process have already been used in Jenkins in one or more projects.  The document proposes to increase the number of people who can perform those steps.

Descriptions of past maintenance projects can be found in blog posts, Jenkins changelogs, and in other locations.  Some samples include:

• Prototype removed from Jenkins
• Spring Security 6, Jakarta EE 9, Eclipse Jetty 12, and Java 17
• Jenkins requires Java 11

Samples of tracking sheets are available at:

• Bruno Verachten's multi-project tracking sheet
• Markus Winter's YahooUI tracking sheet
• Basi Crowl's tracking sheets for
  • Jakarta EE 9 by default
  • Content Security Policy project tracking
  • HTTPClient 3 removal
  • AWS SDK for Java v2
  • PrototypeJS
  • Remove commons compress and JZLib

Thanks to Stefan Spieker for starting the pull request to describe the idea.  Thanks to Basil Crow for leading the maintenance breakout session.  Thanks to all who have already reviewed the document and helped improve it.

Mark Waite