Introducing package maintainers

[Jason Moore]

After discussions at SciPy, we decided to try out a new idea to help delegate maintenance responsibilities to a broader group of people. In particular, we'd like to have a volunteer maintainer for each substantial package in SymPy. I've typed up a page here about this new explicit responsibility:

https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Package-Maintainers

Please read over it and give some feedback. Also, if you'd like to volunteer for a package or packages, please fill in the table I've started.

I'll follow up in a few days after we discuss this a bit.

Keep in mind this is a experiment and if it does not help we can drop it.

Jason
moorepants.info
+01 530-601-9791

[Sartaj Singh]

Hi, 

On Monday, 13 July 2015 06:41:30 UTC+5:30, Jason Moore wrote:

After discussions at SciPy, we decided to try out a new idea to help delegate maintenance responsibilities to a broader group of people. In particular, we'd like to have a volunteer maintainer for each substantial package in SymPy. I've typed up a page here about this new explicit responsibility:

I really like this idea. This may help new comers get more support and an early response. This may also smooth out the development process. 

 

https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/Package-Maintainers

Please read over it and give some feedback. Also, if you'd like to volunteer for a package or packages, please fill in the table I've started.

I would like to be of some help. Until now I have contributed to various packages but lack a very firm grasp on a single package. I have filled my name for the series package as I have maximum contribution under this package. Though I do not consider myself an expert of it. If anybody else is willing to take up let me know.

[Sudhanshu Mishra]

Hi,

​

If anybody else is willing to take up let me know.

​I assume that there can be multiple maintainers. I am not aware of the discussion, though.​

Sudhanshu Mishra

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[Kalevi Suominen]

Hi,

The list of responsibilities seems a bit daunting to me. The step from a contributor to a package maintainer
would be rather high. Perhaps it could be possible to associate a group of interested people with a
package in a less formal way.

[AMiT Kumar]

I totally agree with Kalevi, associating a group of interested people with a
package in a less formal way, would be much better.

BTW, Solvers is a huge domain categorized as a single package, It includes:

* Solvers (Equation solvers)
* ODE

* PDE

* Diophantine

* Recurrence solver

I expect at-least 6-7 people taking up, as interested for helping out with

the responsibilities in a non-formal way.

AMiT Kumar

[Jason Moore]

Yes, we can have multiple package maintainers. For example, we have about 6 people that manage sympy.physics.mechanics and have a group in the github org for them. But they mostly play and informal role, reviewing occasionally, submit some PRs, etc. Because it is informal, things slip past the radar, pr's linger for years, issue's aren't closed, etc. I'm fine with toning down the responsibilities, but the whole point, in my mind, was to make some responsibilities more formal. I see this as both an empowerment to the maintainers and spreading the formal load of managing this project to more parties. I'd personally like to see one main point person for each package, but there can be a group of people maintaining the package. The point person would simply take on the role of monitoring for things that slip past the informal group of maintainers and be the first point of contact for anyone who doesn't know who to ask questions about the code. We can have another column that lists the package "group" or something.

Also note that we could have per module maintainers to if that module is large or we can group packages together. I don't really know the size and complexity of the packages, feel free to modify the table to fix that.

Jason
moorepants.info
+01 530-601-9791

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[Jason Moore]

I'd also say that the package maintainer doesn't have to know every corner of their package, as long as they know who to ping when there is an issue. Say for example, someone reports a bug about part of your package that hasn't been touched in a long time. Your responsibility would be to monitor that issue and to try to find someone that knows how to fix it or initiate and move the conversation forward with your package group or other sympy devs to try to find a solution. You'd be responsible for triaging other related bugs and such but not for actually fixing every bug by writing code (although hopefully you'd do that too).

Jason
moorepants.info
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