Should we clarify the "Lack of activity" rule that make maintainers role lose their status

[matks]

On the Pull Request that introduce Committer role @Progi1984 mentioned he would like that I clarify what is meant by "Lack of activity" Reasons to be revoked of the committer role".

I create this issue so we can explore this item.

[matks]

So @Progi1984 if I understand correctly you would like we clarify these 2 lines:

https://www.prestashop-project.org/maintainers-guide/how-to-become-a-maintainer/

• "Lack of activity for the past six months."

https://www.prestashop-project.org/maintainers-guide/how-to-become-a-committer/

• "Lack of activity for the past three months."

[matks]

Here's my opinion about the subject:

I do not think we have to clarify and make crystal clear everything we write in the maintainer guide.

First, it's impossible 😄 the world and human beings are too messy to be able to fit into tight words. It would be very hard to anticipate and put into words all the things that might happend and could happen. I think following the Agile mindset we should

• put people over processes: when we think there is a problem we discuss together and find the best solution
• write as much as possible things (to keep record and have guidelines) that bring context and help, but decisions should be done by people

If tomorrow for example the maintainer group thinks I, matks, present a lack of activity, it should be a topic to be discussed by maintainers.

If no consensus "yes or no" can be found, then a vote might be done to decide whether or not I present a lack of activity. Only brains can decide whether there is or not a lack of activity, you cant say "lack of activity is less than X reviews per month". Multiple factors have to be acknowledged. Trust the people, not a random metric.

When I try to find what other open source projects do for this problem, I discover PrestaShop is an one open source project with the most detailed process to become maintainer. We're already way above average. Look at Symfony, Doctrine, Laravel, PHP, jQuery, VueJS, I was not able to find clear and detailed "how to become a maintainer" guidelines for these projects. When you browse the topics about maintainer what you can see is basically "want to become a maintainer? contribute then we'll chat" 😄 . If I look at open source projects of size and maturity comparable to us, we're doing way better. Our rules are already very clear compared to other projects.

So I think most open source projects focus on providing guidelines for readers to understand the broad idea of what is meant, what is happening. Here we state "maintainers with lack of activity might lose their status" and I think this is enough for people to get the idea, to understand the context.

I think we are writing guidelines and broad directions in this maintainer guide we are not lawyers we are not writing legal documents. Details and situations should be solved by discussions not by "these words says that X is Y"