From: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Cc: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
Subject: Re: team-maintained packages
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2020 20:37:05 -0600
Message-ID: <1718657.Euugps0dR9@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <1765542.52O7J0OIYB@localhost>
References: <1765542.52O7J0OIYB@localhost>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hello,

On Monday, June 8, 2020 2:13:49 AM MDT Ariadne Conill wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Now that Gitlab is deployed and in place, it is possible to have teams as
> groups in gitlab, such as the core group[1].
> 
> As many maintainers and developers collaborate on packages anyway, I believe
> it is useful to formalize this arrangement.
> 
> Accordingly, I believe that we should allow Gitlab groups to own packages to
> achieve that.  A Gitlab group can be assigned issues in the issue tracker,
> and can have designated "owners" of the group.  Groups are also publicly
> viewable. This solves the traditional accountability issue with team
> maintenance.
> >From an APKBUILD perspective, the maintainer line would look like this:
> # Maintainer: Alpine KDE team <https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/groups/kde>
> # Coordinator: Whoever <whoever@alpinelinux.org>
> 
> The "coordinator" role would be the preferred member in the group for
> contact about the package, but the team as a whole could also make
> decisions about the package as well.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Ariadne
> 
> [1]: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/groups/core

As an update to this, it appears we have consensus on the following points:

1. Teams should exist and be managed using Gitlab.
2. Teams may own packages, the Maintainer entry points to their Gitlab group 
URI.
3. Teams should have a coordinator role that is reflected as the "Owner" role 
in the group.  The coordinator role may change from time to time based on 
consensus of the group.

Accordingly, I would like to propose the following groups as an initial test 
of this proposal.  The member lists here are not exhaustive, I know I am 
missing people who would probably like to be members or should be members of 
these teams.

* Alpine desktop team

This team focuses on coordination of desktop-wide packaging, policy, theming 
etc.  This team does not just produce packaging, but also themes (perhaps an 
alpine-backgrounds package for example), and software that integrates desktop 
environments with Alpine features, such as apk-tools integration, live desktop 
environment, GUI installer, etc.  Basically a catch-all group to deal with the 
meta issues surrounding plumbing the alpine desktop.

Members: myself, Cogitri (as coordinator), PureTryOut, Leo

* X11/Wayland

This team focuses on maintenance of X11 and Wayland.

Members: ncopa, Cogitri, Leo

* KDE

This team focuses on maintenance of KDE.

Members: myself, PureTryOut (coordinator).

* Toolchain

This team formalizes the current maintenance arrangement with the toolchain.  
It would take over maintenance of binutils, gcc, llvm, musl, pkgconf and other 
core toolchain packages.

Members: myself, mps, fabled, ncopa (coordinator)

* Kernel

Same story as toolchain but with kernel.

Members: myself, ncopa (coordinator), mps

* Development Tools

This group deals with producing/maintaining software such as atools, abuild 
etc.

Members: Leo, ncopa (and whoever else is working on these kinds of tools, 
ncopa probably as coordinator here)

There are other parts of the system that could benefit from this, but lets wait 
on those until we become more comfortable with team maintenance and SIGs in 
general.

Ariadne