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so far there were no even remotely measurable objectives, only a general purpose statement. this change is intended to focus the team's work on what I (and many others I talked to) perceive to be the main pain point in the development process. Co-authored-by: solene.rapenne@tweag.io |
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Nix maintainers team
Motivation
In order to attract more maintainers and thereby scale the development process to match user needs, the main goal of this team is to improve the Nix contributor experience.
Objectives
- It is obvious what is worthwhile to work on.
- It is easy to find the right place in the code to make a change.
- It is clear what is expected of a pull request.
- It is predictable how to get a change merged and released.
Tasks
- Elaborate contribution guides and abide to them
- Improve documentation targeted to contributors
- Maintain the issue tracker and triage pull requests
- Help competent contributors succeed with their pull requests
- Ensure the required maintainer capacity for all of the above
Members
- Eelco Dolstra (@edolstra) – Team lead
- Théophane Hufschmitt (@thufschmitt)
- Valentin Gagarin (@fricklerhandwerk)
- Thomas Bereknyei (@tomberek)
- Robert Hensing (@roberth)
Meeting protocol
The team meets twice a week:
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Discussion meeting: Fridays 13:00-14:00 CET
- Triage issues and pull requests from the No Status column (30 min)
- Discuss issues and pull requests from the To discuss column (30 min)
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Work meeting: Mondays 13:00-15:00 CET
- Code review on pull requests from In review.
- Other chores and tasks.
Meeting notes are collected on a collaborative scratchpad, and published on Discourse under the Nix category.
Project board protocol
The team uses a GitHub project board for tracking its work.
Issues on the board progress through the following states:
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No Status
During the discussion meeting, the team triages new items. To be considered, issues and pull requests must have a high-level description to provide the whole team with the necessary context at a glance.
On every meeting, at least one item from each of the following categories is inspected:
Team members can also add pull requests or issues they would like the whole team to consider.
If there is disagreement on the general idea behind an issue or pull request, it is moved to To discuss, otherwise to In review.
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To discuss
Pull requests and issues that are deemed important and controversial are discussed by the team during discussion meetings.
This may be where the merit of the change itself or the implementation strategy is contested by a team member.
As a general guideline, the order of items is determined as follows:
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Prioritise pull requests over issues
Contributors who took the time to implement concrete change proposals should not wait indefinitely.
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Prioritise fixing bugs over documentation, improvements or new features
The team values stability and accessibility higher than raw functionality.
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Interleave issues and PRs
This way issues without attempts at a solution get a chance to get addressed.
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In review
Pull requests in this column are reviewed together during work meetings. This is both for spreading implementation knowledge and for establishing common values in code reviews.
When the overall direction is agreed upon, even when further changes are required, the pull request is assigned to one team member.
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Assigned for merging
One team member is assigned to each of these pull requests. They will communicate with the authors, and make the final approval once all remaining issues are addressed.
If more substantive issues arise, the assignee can move the pull request back to To discuss to involve the team again.
The process is illustrated in the following diagram:
flowchart TD
discuss[To discuss]
review[To review]
New --> |Disagreement on idea| discuss
New & discuss --> |Consensus on idea| review
review --> |Consensus on implementation| Assigned
Assigned --> |Implementation issues arise| review
Assigned --> |Remaining issues fixed| Merged