about cypari2 development amd maintenance on github

[Vincent Delecroix]

Dear all,

I am one of the maintainer of cypari2. Contrarily to Jeroen and Luca
who left, I am not a number theorist and not a specialist of PARI/GP.
I took over the maintainance responsability because it felt like a
good thing for the math community and because PARI development happens
in a nearby lab and Bill Allombert is constantly helping.

I had other tasks to do these days and was not very pro-active. Some
members of sagemath, though not registered as sagemath/cypari2 admin,
decided to start integrating merge requests even though these merge
requests were not adequate (eg version bump inside a merge request and
code that depended on a development branch of cysignals). It took me a
lot of headache to rewrite git history and end up with a clean
release. I am very frustrated that it took me a full day rather than
an hour to finalize this release. Moreover, the forced push to the
master branch is not nice to the contributors of cypari2.

Do you have suggestion on how such things could be avoided with
cypari2 being on github under the sagemath group?

Best regards,
Vincent

[Tobias Diez]

One can use the branch protection rule to restrict who can merge PRs into the protected branch: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches-and-merges-in-your-repository/defining-the-mergeability-of-pull-requests/about-protected-branches#restrict-who-can-push-to-matching-branches

But of course this only takes care of the technical side. It can of course still happen that someone oversees an issue in a PR or that the standard of "good code" differ slightly. I guess for this only communication, writing documentation and, for the base level, linter help.

[Matthias Koeppe]

I raised the issue of governance of the repos hosted in the github.com/sagemath organization in https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/JBFbtUNhqNU/m/KuySNvTuBAAJ

It surely needs clarification.