scottrigby
commented
2 years ago Hey @joejulian 👋 Thank you!
I was involved in this decision for the Flux combined maintainers list. You're right this was part of the motivation for that too. It's also good to show CNCF the reality of who is working to maintain each project as the project evolves. Even a graduated and very stable project like Helm recognizes it needs new maintainers for the health of the project. I agree a good step toward that is making sure to recognize existing maintainers. I know we're all grateful for people like you for example, who are triage maintainers – this is so important. Helping these people, and their companies, get recognized by CNCF for this work is not only good to retain and attract new maintainers, I think it's the right thing to do. But that is only my opinion, let's see what the rest of the org maintainers think.
In the meantime, here are the scripts used to create the Flux combined maintainers list. Practically speaking, creating this was necessary because the CSV that https://maintainers.cncf.io redirects to is designed to reference only one OWNERS/MAINTAINERS file. The Flux project automation is set up to help make sure this combined file doesn't get out of sync with the owner files in each repo. The syntax of the source MAINTAINERS files in Flux is a bit different than the Helm OWNERS files, but that should be pretty easy to update.
- Here is the combined list file: https://github.com/fluxcd/community/blob/main/project/flux-project-maintainers.yaml. Note that the combined yaml is keyed by repo name within the fluxcd github org. This makes it clear who is maintaining which repo/component
- The parent directory also has a generated alumni file (same as Helm emeritus maintainers), and the script
- The script is python, because the person who wrote is was most familiar with that: https://github.com/fluxcd/community/blob/main/project/get_project_data, though I'd think we could use Go for Helm. Our maintainers files are already YAML so that makes it even easier
- The script is triggered on a cron, via this GH action: https://github.com/fluxcd/community/blob/main/.github/workflows/update-project-data.yaml
- Here was the initial PR to get the ball rolling, which was unscripted https://github.com/fluxcd/community/pull/134. The steps for automating this were added as a follow-up issue. IMO for Helm we'd want to make sure a combined maintainers file is automated from the start.
bacongobbler
I've been going through the oldest issues looking to see why they're not resolved. Some of them could be resolved by open PRs that could have been but were not merged for quite some time. It seems like we need more maintainers.
One value individuals and companies get from maintaining upstream projects (besides the obvious stable code and feedback to ensure their business needs are met) is community recognition. This recognition provides value to the contributor and their employer and just feels good. Part of that is being recognized as a maintainer by the CNCF, and being able to take part in discussions on the cncf-helm-maintainers list.
Currently, only the nine Helm Org maintainers are listed as Helm maintainers on the official CNCF spreadsheet.
Some of our team is also involved in the Flux project. We have seen where Weaveworks has implemented a strategy where they collect all the names in all the MAINTAINERS files from all the repos for submission to the CNCF. If we did something similar, I think we could get more maintainers, shorten the PR backlog, and that would lead to more contributors and a healthier community.