Automating package maintainers responsivity check

[Mattia Verga]

Too often there are "non responsive maintainer" messages here.

Sometimes this is because a maintainer has lost their interest in Fedora
and left their responsibilities without communication, which means their
packages can be left unmaintained for long time in repositories before
someone notice that.

At other times the maintainer is still active, but for some reason they
are unreachable to users (email change, etc.).

I would propose some sort of automatic check of maintainer responsivity.
Maybe a tool that checks a packager activity in the last 6 months and if
there is no activity then sends an email asking the maintainer to
confirm they're still involved in Fedora. In case there's no reply,
either automatically orphan their packages or notify someone
(devel-list) to try to reach them.

What do you think?

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[Sheogorath]

Post by Mattia Verga
I would propose some sort of automatic check of maintainer responsivity.
Maybe a tool that checks a packager activity in the last 6 months and if
there is no activity then sends an email asking the maintainer to
confirm they're still involved in Fedora. In case there's no reply,
either automatically orphan their packages or notify someone
(devel-list) to try to reach them.
What do you think?

So basically a heartbeat for developers? Maybe make it even more
automatic. When people are not active, they get an email about the
branching. when they don't react their package is not branched to the
new release. This will cause broken builds, yes. But that's actually the
point since people will ask the maintainer to branch it **now**. When
people don't react it's time to get a new maintainer. And the people who
are maybe interested in being this new maintainer: The people who need
the package.

Maybe I'm a bit to easy with taking packages away from unresponsive
maintainers, but I think this would be a quite easy way to take care of
those things.

[Manas Mangaonkar]

Yes, this could be a good idea. Might be too small as a gsoc project
though.

I'd happily take this as i am anyways going to try for gsoc 19 with
fedora,this could be a good starting point.

A simple dockerized/contenerized python based app could be done as a very
simple implementation.



On Nov 17, 2018 4:35 PM, "Mattia Verga" <***@protonmail.com> wrote:

Too often there are "non responsive maintainer" messages here.

Sometimes this is because a maintainer has lost their interest in Fedora
and left their responsibilities without communication, which means their
packages can be left unmaintained for long time in repositories before
someone notice that.

At other times the maintainer is still active, but for some reason they
are unreachable to users (email change, etc.).

I would propose some sort of automatic check of maintainer responsivity.
Maybe a tool that checks a packager activity in the last 6 months and if
there is no activity then sends an email asking the maintainer to
confirm they're still involved in Fedora. In case there's no reply,
either automatically orphan their packages or notify someone
(devel-list) to try to reach them.

What do you think?

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[Ron Olson]

What about packages that see infrequent updates; I maintain Nethack and the Dev Team can and does take years between releases. If it's just a blanket email to ask the packagers if they're still interested that's one thing, but going off package updates may be problematic for some folks.

Yes, this could be a good idea. Might be too small as a gsoc project though.
I'd happily take this as i am anyways going to try for gsoc 19 with fedora,this could be a good starting point.
A simple dockerized/contenerized python based app could be done as a very simple implementation.
Too often there are "non responsive maintainer" messages here.
Sometimes this is because a maintainer has lost their interest in Fedora
and left their responsibilities without communication, which means their
packages can be left unmaintained for long time in repositories before
someone notice that.
At other times the maintainer is still active, but for some reason they
are unreachable to users (email change, etc.).
I would propose some sort of automatic check of maintainer responsivity.
Maybe a tool that checks a packager activity in the last 6 months and if
there is no activity then sends an email asking the maintainer to
confirm they're still involved in Fedora. In case there's no reply,
either automatically orphan their packages or notify someone
(devel-list) to try to reach them.
What do you think?
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[Mattia Verga]

Post by Ron Olson
What about packages that see infrequent updates; I maintain Nethack
and the Dev Team can and does take years between releases. If it's
just a blanket email to ask the packagers if they're still interested
that's one thing, but going off package updates may be problematic for
some folks.

I'm thinking about a script which would run every month and:

- checks maintainer activities in git / bugzilla / mailing lists
(something like fedora-active-user already does) in the last six months
- if the user hasn't done any activity, send an email with a link
  - if the user visit the link, do not bother them for the next 6 months
  - if the user doesn't visit the link, send a second email after one
week and a third after another week
- after three emails without response, orphan their packages and inform
devel list

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[Mattia Verga]

You want to attract packagers, not irritate them.

In my opinion, "irritating" is when a maintainer doesn't reply to bugs that users fill in Bugzilla. If they can't found enough time to reply or change state of any bug in a six months period, than maybe it is better someone else take care of their package.

Being a volunteer doesn't mean to not have any responsibility.

[Kevin Fenzi]

Post by Mattia Verga

You want to attract packagers, not irritate them.

In my opinion, "irritating" is when a maintainer doesn't reply to bugs that users fill in Bugzilla. If they can't found enough time to reply or change state of any bug in a six months period, than maybe it is better someone else take care of their package.
Being a volunteer doesn't mean to not have any responsibility.

So, this has come up... at least 3 times.
I can't seem to find the first one, but at least one of the old discussions:

https://lwn.net/Articles/261833/

it was always decided that it would be too annoying to maintainers, but
that was before we had fedmsg and more information on activity, so
perhaps it's worth looking into again.

One of the problems is that we want bugs fixed, but all bugs are not
created equal. We don't want to force maintainers to say they are active
in every bug they get, but currently we allow non responsive process for
that, so a activity ping might well be an improvement over that.

We also want to know when people are inactive so we can get someone else
to maintain their packages, but any packages with co-maintainers should
already be taking that on, so perhaps we should worry more about
packages that only have one maintainer?

kevin

[Jonathan Wakely]

Post by Mattia Verga

You want to attract packagers, not irritate them.

In my opinion, "irritating" is when a maintainer doesn't reply to bugs that users fill in Bugzilla. If they can't found enough time to reply or change state of any bug in a six months period, than maybe it is better someone else take care of their package.

This assumes there is a queue of ready and willing (and competent)
volunteers to take on packages that get automatically orphaned. Is
that true? I doubt it. If those people exist, why aren't they already
offering to co-maintain packages, or responding to some of those open
bugs?

I don't think those people exist. Not in significant numbers anyway.

Automatically taking away packages from inactive maintainers is
probably just going to mean even more work for a small handful of
people who already do tons of work for the distro anyway. They'll have
to take on all those orphaned packages, to ensure the distro keeps
working. I don't want to overload those people.

Post by Mattia Verga
Being a volunteer doesn't mean to not have any responsibility.

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[Peter Oliver]

Post by Jonathan Wakely
This assumes there is a queue of ready and willing (and competent)
volunteers to take on packages that get automatically orphaned. Is
that true? I doubt it. If those people exist, why aren't they already
offering to co-maintain packages, or responding to some of those open
bugs?

A possible answer to that question could be that no-ones going to volunteer
to do work that they assume someone else already has in hand.

Also, it's hard to volunteer to co-maintain a package which has a
non-responsive maintainer, because there is no one to grant you access.
For simple packages that only require a minor version update, invoking and
following through the non-responsive maintainer process is often more
effort than the outstanding work required on the package.

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

PO> Also, it's hard to volunteer to co-maintain a package which has a
PO> non-responsive maintainer, because there is no one to grant you
PO> access.

Well, certainly there is but the issue is finding the proper way to ask
for it. And I don't think we have any well-defined policy for that.
Certainly admin privileges have been in the past to rectify this
sort of situation on a one-off basis. I've done it a few times when
presented with a reasonable case.

Since the earliest days of pkgdb we've struggled with the best way to
deal with requests for package comaintainership which went unprocessed.
The problem has always been to maintain some reasonable openness while
still allowing maintainers to have some control over what goes into a
package.

And now with the switch to pagure we've lost the means for someone to
request access (though of course bugzilla works as a fallback while
still preserving an audit trail).

Personally I'd propose something like this as a policy:

-----
If you are an existing packager and wish to be added as a comaintainer
on a package, you should first communicate with the existing maintainers
via email (PKG-***@fedoraproject.org), on IRC, in person, etc.
But if you receive no response, please open a bugzilla ticket against
the package. Use "Requesting comaintainer access to PKG" as the ticket
summary. In the ticket description, please explain why you should be
added as a comaintainer. (XXX perhaps include more detail on what
someone should say.)

If you have not received a response in (one month/two weeks/???) you may
file a ticket with (FESCo/another group) requesting that you be granted
commit access to the package. They will review your request and if
warranted grant the requested permissions.

If your need is urgent, perhaps because you are attempting to fix
security issues or significant bugs in a package, you may also wish to
contact the provenpackagers (XXX link) to ask them to merge a pull
request for you.
-----

PO> For simple packages that only require a minor version
PO> update, invoking and following through the non-responsive maintainer
PO> process is often more effort than the outstanding work required on
PO> the package.

True, but that's part of why we have provenpackagers. Certainly if
there's no urgent need then there's no reason to go outside of existing
policy but we should still have something in between "ask
provenpackagers to merge ignored PRs" and "orphan packages because of
unresponsive maintainers". If someone wants to help maintain a package,
we really should consider just letting them.

- J<
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[Richard Shaw]

Post by Mattia Verga
- after three emails without response, orphan their packages and inform
devel list

I'm not sure I'm in favor of automatically orphaning packages. I think it
could "tell" of them to the devel list that way anyone who knows them can
try to get in touch with them before that happens.

Thanks,
Richard

[Leigh Scott]

Post by Mattia Verga
Maybe a tool that checks a packager activity in the last 6 months and if
What do you think?

Better make it a year as people are entitled to a break!
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