[python-committers] Maintenance Tasks

[Brett Cannon]

On Fri, 15 Jun 2018 at 17:44 Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> At FOSDEM (last February), I saw an interesting talk by VM (Vicky)
> Brasseur:
> "Passing the Baton: Succession planning for FOSS leadership"
>
> She explains that the maintenance of a project should be splited into
> small tasks, and that each task should be done by at least two people.
> Why at least two, and not only one? Well, sometimes you may want to
> take holiday, one of your family member may become sick, or maybe you
> are simply bored and wants to do something else. You may have heard
> about the "bus factor", but I dislike this name because it sounds like
> a very unlikely event, whereas people leaving for whatever reason is
> common.
>
> It's also about documenting what you are doing to be able to pass the
> task to someone else. What should be documented? Well, here is where
> the second player matters: document enough until someone else is
> autonomous on the task.
>
> What are Python maintenance tasks? I identified the following tasks:
> http://pythondev.readthedocs.io/maintenance_tasks.html
>
> Copy of my list:
>
> * `Review and merge pull requests
> <https://github.com/python/cpython/pulls>`_. The merge action is
> restricted to core developers.
>   Maintainers: active core developers (June 2018: around 34 core devs).
> * `Bug triage <https://bugs.python.org/>`_: closing a bug requires the
> bug triage
>   permission. Maintainers: active core developers.
> * `Check for buildbot failures
>   <https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/buildbot-status.python.org/
> >`_:
>   Read logs of each buildbot failure, check if the failure is known. If the
>   failure is known, maybe mention the new failure in the existing bug.
>   Otherwise, open a new bug. Then reply to the email with a link to the
> bug.
>   Maintainers: Victor Stinner, Pablo Salingo Salgado.
> * Run bugs.python.org: fix bugs, deploy new version. See the
>   `meta bug tracker <http://psf.upfronthosting.co.za/roundup/meta/>`_ for
> bugs
>   of bugs.python.org itself (not for Python bugs). Roundup is going to be
>   deployed in a Docker container on OpenShift. Maintainers:
>   Ezio Melotti, Brett Cannon, Maciej Szulik.
>

I'm not a maintainer of bugs.python.org.


> * `Run pythontest.net <http://www.pythontest.net/>`_. Maintainers: ?
> * Run GitHub bots. Maintainers: Brett Cannon and Mariatta Wijaya.
> * Update vendored external libraries. Maintainers: ?
> * Update unicodedata on new Unicode release. Latest update (Unicode 11.0):
>   https://bugs.python.org/issue33778. Maintainer: Benajamin Peterson.
>
> I likely forget many tasks, since "maintenance" is a large topic and
> there are some tasks that are only be done rarely (like releases?).
>
>
> By the way, I also started to list known administrators. Some actions
> require administrators who are the only ones allowed to do actions.
>
> * Mailing lists: create a new mailing list. Maintainer: "postmaster" (who
> is
>   the current postmaster?).
>

There's a couple.


> * Bug tracker: give "bug triage permission". Administrators: Ezio Melotti,
>   Ned Deily(?), R. David Murray.
>

Also me.


> * GitHub cpython: add new core developers. Administrators: Brett Cannon,
>   Ned Deily, others(?).
>

Me and any release manager.

-Brett


>
>
> I chose to start discussing maintenance tasks with core developers
> only (python-committers mailing list) since many tasks are reserved to
> (or at least currently done by) core developers. And I'm not sure that
> the concept of "maintenance tasks" makes sense, so I prefer to start
> discussing it with smaller audience :-)
>
> Note: The talk title is "Passing the Baton: Succession planning for
> FOSS leadership", but I don't ask here your BDFL to pass the baton ;-)
> I'm talking about the rest of talk.
>
> Victor
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