DSchau
commented
5 years ago @arcanis thanks for mentioning us--let me fill in a few details as to how we do things and happy to help with whatever, too!
Also @jlengstorf was instrumental in getting some of this set up, so his insight would be valuable here too!
maybe we should have a @yarnpkg/contributors team where would be automatically added anyone with a merged PR
As you noted--this is what we do. I think it's huge in gaining a sense of community and growing involvement in that community. We go a step farther and invite to a swag store (with a coupon code) on the first PR merged--which is pretty slick!
When you establish this community, you also then have a great avenue to share relevant information, news, changelogs, etc. We post a weekly Gatsby Gazette to this group, which is effectively a newsletter with the latest Gatsby news, features, etc.
Note: need to be a Gatsby Maintainer to view the link--but I know @arcanis is 🙌
We could post the changelog in this group after each release to keep people engaged
Not sure how regular your release cadence is--but this could get a bit noisy. We publish daily, so our "weekly wrap up" seems to work pretty well, but it is a bit more of a manual process, e.g. hand-picking the valuable features, changelogs, etc.
We should probably try to have some core contributors on Windows. We periodically try to support people on it (and our testsuites runs on Windows as well), but having someone taking responsibility to approve Windows PR would be awesome
We also struggle with this. Our Windows tests run in Appveyor and Azure Pipelines (as yours do?)--neither of which really report back timely feedback. It is nice to have the sanity check, but it's hard to ensure we get this 100% right. If there are other alternatives here--we'd love to check them out!
Should we have a bot to close stale issues?
As you may know--this is what we do and we've seen our issues go down quite a bit. We haven't as of yet applied this bot or similar functionality for PRs, but it's something we've certainly considered. If it helps, here is our process/flow:
- Issues older than 20 days, get a label
stale?(if the label "not stale" is not present)- The bot posts a comment, e.g. "This issue hasn't had a reply in quite some time. If we don't hear back soon, we'll be closing out this issue!"
- If anyone comments, the issue falls out, and we revisit it 20 days later (if applicable)
- If the label "not stale" is applied, the logic short circuits and we won't revisit
- If after 30 days, 0 replies, and the label "stale?" we close the issue out.
This has worked fairly well for us. We use Peril, and our configuration is here. We'd love to mess around with Github actions or something, but haven't as of yet been able to access/experiment with any of that stuff!
Hopefully this is helpful! Please feel free to reach out if we can help with anything else!
jlengstorf
torifat
Daniel15
arcanis
KyleAMathews
rally25rs
olingern
mollyIV
jcrben
Now that Yarn literally supports half the Javascript ecosystem I think we should figure out a way to make it more likely that we receive day-to-day contributions to Yarn. By day-to-day I mean things like:
The typical contributors we have fix the problems they have then disappear. While it's nice to have a constant flow of contribution, it's also slightly overwhelming for me, and we probably would all benefit from a more uniform responsibility.
Should we start publishing on Yarn's front page the companies that employ our core contributors (if both of them wish to)? This would give them an extra incentive to allow their developers to spend time helping Yarn. We could revisit the companies on the front page every six months or so.
The yarnpkg teams are a bit opaque imo - there's a lot of people inside the org that I never saw contribute, and I'd prefer to give visibility to our active contributors (as a kind of reward).
Maybe we should remove the per-company teams (especially if we advertise such companies on the front page), and remove everyone who isn't in the @yarnpkg/core team from the organization.
Instead, maybe we should have a @yarnpkg/contributors team where would be automatically added anyone with a merged PR. That's something that Gatsby does and it feels nice to have a friendly message inviting us to a "private" group after our first contribution gets merged.
People in this team would have review permissions and tag permissions.
They would still be subject to the CoC, of course.
We could post the changelog in this group after each release to keep people engaged.
Maybe @KyleAMathews or @DSchau could share some of their experience on this?
We should probably try to have some core contributors on Windows. We periodically try to support people on it (and our testsuites runs on Windows as well), but having someone taking responsibility to approve Windows PR would be awesome.
Most of the issues we have (and a good chunk of the PRs, unfortunately) are too old to be acted upon - in most cases they've already been fixed, or were wontfix, ... basically hard to do anything about. We made a huge work at the time of the 1.0 release to review them all, but I'm not all that certain it had a lot of impact compared to the time investment (plus a lot of them were left open waiting for more details that never came).
Do you have other ideas?