[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Improving how we work in xwiki-contrib

Hi all, This mail is about trying to improve how we work in xwiki-contrib and it supersedes the proposal I sent at http://markmail.org/message/qzc7ipiu6lazwbwr Issues with current way of working in xwiki-contrib: * Each project has a lead but this lead is MIA for a lot of extensions and it's a pain to maintain (I'm trying to do it but it's a pain) * It doesn't make much sense to have a lead for an extension but then allowing anyone to commit on it without the lead's approval, nor allowing anyone to release new versions of that project without the lead participating to the discussion. * Right now a committer can release a project using maven but doesn't have permissions to release it in jira nor creating a new version, causing synchronization issues * The XWiki core committers are going to move a lot of non-core extensions to xwiki-contrib but there's no clear lead for a lot of those extensions since they were developed collaboratively and there's no notion of lead in the xwiki github organization. In practice the person from the XWiki core devs to work on a given extension varies over time (that’s how those extensions were built). It's not possible (and not a good idea) to give a long-time leadership to a single person. Proposal: ========= * XWiki Contrib is a community where extensions for XWiki can be developed and maintained together. It's a place that is of interest for people who want to share their sources and work collaboratively with others on them. If the intent is only to make an extension available to users of XWiki then it's enough to publish the binaries on extensions.xwiki.org (and put the souces anywhere they wish, including on the e.x.o page or on their github account if they have one). * XWiki Contrib is defined by the xwiki-contrib github organization * Anyone can request to join this community. This is the main difference with the xwiki github organization where you need to be voted in to become a committer. The main rationale is that making a mistake in the core has more impact than doing this in an extension. The second rationale is that this is an experiment to see if we can have a more vibrant community as a result of being more open, without loosing too much quality. * Once someone joins, he/she has commit access to all repositories in xwiki-contrib (and he/she's also added to a group on jira allowing him to create versions and releasing them.). The goal is to favor cross-pollination. In case this causes problem in the future, we can collaboratively decide to have stricter rules but it's a good experiment/principle to start as open as possible and close only if need be (the wiki principle ;)). So far, after several years of operations, there have been no incident in this way of working for xwiki-contrib that would have required restricting permissions. * In order to simplify participating to any project in xwiki-contrib, the recommended development practices to follow are those found on dev.xwiki.org, i.e. the same as for the xwiki github organization. This prevents the issue that someone who wants to participate to more than 1 project needs to learn several dev practices; they're all the same. Now, these practices are best practices and the intent is that committers try to follow them as much as they can, in their capacity. Other committers reviewing code should be lenient in their comments and sentences like "You must do xxx" should be avoided and instead sentences like "When you have the time, it would be nice if you could...". OTOH, when a committer joins xwiki-contrib, he/she should understand that these best practices exist (and possibly spend some time reading them), and agree about following them as much as he/she can. Obviously anyone is free to discuss an existing rule and propose changing it or dropping it altogether. * Anyone is free to release any project at any time. Recommendation is to send a release "[Proposal]" mail with a few lines explaining the intent to release on such date. If not possible for some constraint (time, neeed to release something else quickly that depends on a given extension, etc) then the release can be performed and some "[ANN]" mail sent later on to announce the release. * Details on best practices (how to write one's pom.xml, how to document extensions on extensions.xwiki.org, etc) are found on contrib.xwiki.org WDYT? Thanks -Vincent