January 18, 2024 Agenda

[outSH]

@tkuhrt I'd like to propose a new discussion item that initially came out in Cacti project. As a plugin based project, we accept contributions from different, unrelated parties. Some time ago we merged a component from Huawei, which requires some additional work to be done before V2 release (it blocks other tasks). The contributor is unreachable, neither through github or email.

The question is - do we have a policy for deprecating / removing code that is no longer maintained by the original contributor that is fair for everyone involved? That is - modules not removed maliciously by small group of maintainers, contributor has some time to resolve issues but when they fail to do that the component can be removed? If not, can you share some guidelines? @petermetz and @VRamakrishna can share more details during the meeting.

[tkuhrt]

@outSH : In general, we leave these decisions up to the project maintainers. The only document that we have is a default policy for projects that do not have a maintainer inactivity policy.

[tkuhrt]

@outSH : We discussed this during today's TOC call. Here are a few points that came out of that discussion:

• @hartm has reached out about the given topic and will report back
• @yacovm suggested that the maintainers reach out on the mailing list to see if anyone is using or dependent on the feature. If so, see about having them take on the contribution role
• @denyeart said that it is much easier to remove a feature that has not been part of a release. If the feature has already been part of a release, then it should be deprecated before removed

cc: @VRamakrishna @petermetz