Topic on Talk:Developers/Maintainers

There are a number of components which list former Foundation staff or inactive community members in the "maintainers" column. I'm wondering if they are left there to provide history of who was active in that area in the past or if they are more commonly there because nobody has removed their names?

Specifically I'm thinking about mentions of Brad Jorsch/Anomie, Parent5446, Chad Horohoe, Kaldari, MaxSem, Victor Vasiliev, Michael Dale, and Erik Zachte in the various lists. There may be other inactive folks in the lists as well, but this set of folks jumped out at me today as folks who used to be around in the projects, but who I have not seen in active discussions for months or years.

+1. And for (in theory) WMF "maintained"/"stewarded" codebases, I'd love to see individual names removed.

+1 yes, maintainers and code stewards should be removed when they are no longer active. I guess the defining what "no longer active" is necessary though, especially for volunteer maintainers. Not sure how to measure that. Suggestions? As for staff, that's probably easier - remove them as maintainers, notify them, and them add themselves back if they do plan to continue maintaining things.

I agree that "inactive" is nebulous, but we can probably just pick a random duration that seems long enough to allow for normal wikibreaks. I'll throw out 180 days (~6 months) of no gerrit activity as a starting point for that discussion.

We are really only talking about editing a column on a wiki page here, so there is no long lasting harm for a false positive removal. A lightweight process could be just to BOLDly edit and also leave a talk page message for the user pointing to the diff that removed them and making it clear that they can revert that if the removal was in error.

A related question to go with the policy would be who, if anyone, is in a reasonable position to actually audit this table once or twice a year.

Good point, very little harm indeed :-) I think it makes sense for it to be someone in EngProd. I'll poke Tyler to see if that would be something easy enough to do in RelEng.

I've removed myself from everywhere but also paradoxically added myself as a maintainer for WikiHiero because I seem to be the only human in existence to give a fuck about this extension, at least as far as code reviews go.

Tyler and I talked a bit about this and have some ideas about how to do it. Seems like an interesting project to take on. Looking for it to be an automated process.

@JBranaa (WMF), wondering if you're still considering a process to audit or automate this doc? If not, I think perhaps we should mark it as archived or outdated, so it doesn't mislead. I was reviewing this page as part of doc reviews the Developer Advocacy team has undertaken for a set of key technical docs; see phab:T293793.

@TBurmeister (WMF) this effort has stalled for a variety of reasons, but at this juncture it's our only record so I'd be hesitant to retire it without an alternative in place.