Re: Octave Forge -- Looking for a new leader

[Carnë Draug]

On 22 December 2016 at 14:56, Olaf Till <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 10:09:38PM +0000, Carnë Draug wrote:
>> Hi everyone
>>
>> For quite some time I have been the primary maintainer of the
>> Octave-Forge project but for the last year or so I have not been
>> able to do what is required for such a position.
>>
>> I have been feeling it creep for a while so six months ago I suggested
>> to have some sort of election like Debian does [1].  When no one
>> said anything, I realized it was a terrible idea.  Still, we need a
>> new maintainer for the project. The current situation is not good
>> for me and is not good for the project either.
>>
>> Is anybody interested in taking the lead? If you are not comfortable
>> naming yourself, then feel free to contact me offline.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Carnë
>>
>> [1] 
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/octave-maintainers/2016-04/msg00054.html
>
> Carnë,
>
> this is bad news. And I'm sure we are all grateful for your work, even
> those who rather emotionally discuss details of strategy. But it is
> understandable that one person doesn't want to do all that work
> forever. The lack of response to your previous suggestion (election)
> might have been due to nobody wanting to take this all to himself, all
> rather hoping you would carry on.
>
> Could we divide the position into sub-tasks, most of them more similar
> to simple package management? The following list of possible sub-tasks
> is not well thought through, only an illustration:
>
> 1. Authority to take final decisions (in case of lack of discussion,
>    or of ambiguous result of discussion) on inclusion/exclusion of
>    packages and all important issues of strategy. This could even be
>    assigned to a group of persons, with an order of precedence as a
>    fallback for the case that they can't come to a majority decision.
>
> 2. Web-page maintanance.
>
> 3. Package release mangagement.
>
> 4. The generate_html package is already separatly maintained by
>    Julien, who is generally open to contributions by others.
>
> 5. Further development of the pkg suite. I'm not wholly aware of the
>    current maintanance status there. But I think there should be a
>    responsible person, with write access.
>
> 6. What else? ...
>
> I faintly remember that something similar has already been discussed,
> but I can't recall the details, forgive me.
>
> Carnë, what is your own opinion to this? Maybe you would even be
> willing to take over one of the subtasks? Maybe even task 1., possibly
> together with others in a group?
>
> BTW: To have some election system would seem good to me. It could even
> be used for details, not only for choosing leaders. Currently
> decisions are taken based on comments of those who happen to take part
> in the discussion.
>
> Olaf

I am fine with the division of the position into tasks.  This
division should be made very clear.  I am less sure about having
multiple people sharing one task as this has not worked well before.
I am unsure what the cause of it is but seems that in such situations
all the work ends up being done by only one of the persons.

On the list of tasks you made, I would arguee that development of
pkg is something for Octave core to handle.  The persons involved
with packages should end up naturally improving it in core.

There are many random things that come every once in a while:

* sorting out package maintainer issues with version control (I
  believe it was always either an issue with mercurial and git, or
  sourceforge being temporarily down).  Most of this happens outside
  the mailing list.
* Giving new people push access.
* Reviewing the first commits of a new contributor that wants to take
  over an unmaintained package.
* Keeping backups of octave forge website and packages.
* Anything else that shows up and is not specific to a single package
  such as the recent change of sourceforge to https, or the move of
  all packages from svn to hg and git.

I would add the minor task of tracking down package maintainers that
are not much involved with issues for their packages or when there's
something really important to be discussed.  Several maintainers seem
to not follow the bug tracker or mailing list so anything important
needs to be forwarded to them.  One can arguee that it's those
maintainers loss if they miss those notifications and that no one
should be tasked with forwarding this to them.  But the loss leaks to
the users and ultimately into community.  From the side of such
maintainers, it can be argued that our mailing list and bug tracker
have too much traffic when there's only two messages a year they care
about.  That's a valid point and the solution may be to have a
separate mailing list and bug trackers for such packages.  However,
my opinion on that is that it would fragment the Octave community.

Election based decisions seem good to me.  I found some discussions
to be far too time consuming.  It also doesn't help that when making
arguments one will mostly hear from people that disagree which makes
it very unpleasant.  Email seems to be a really bad medium for such
long discussions, even with our bottom posting and inline style.
If this goes forward, I would suggest a page on the wiki for each
decision with the multiple options written by the project leader, a
section for each person wanting to add their own arguments, and then
a public vote.  Debian seems to have an email system to handle all
that but someone would have to set it up.

Carnë