in some of our GitHub projects, we have this documentation outlining that there should be a MAINTAINERS file which documents who are the people maintaining the particular project or subdirectories of it. It also says that vacations should be documented within this file (which seems to be a little bit too much overhead, at least for the less frequented repositories).
Anyway, I just checked our GitHub projects and in nearly all of them, there is either no MAINTAINERS file at all or it’s outdated. So how do we want to handle this? Should we change the docs or should we create/update the MAINTAINERS files? My suggestion would be:
creating/updating MAINTAINERS files on all GitHub projects
removing the rule for documenting vacations or limit it to long absences like > 1 month and/or to highly frequented repos like openhab2-addons
Hey @pfink,
At openhab-android (and openhab2-addons) we use Pullapprove to show the PR opener that all commits should be signed. We also could use it to make sure PRs are approved by the half of the maintainer (“could”, because I’m the only active maintainer).
The configuration file contains the github team name (https://github.com/openhab/openhab-android/blob/master/.pullapprove.yml#L27) and resolves that to the github commit check “Approval required by 1 of: digitaldan, mueller-ma”, so everyone knows who must review this PR.
Maintaining an extra file for the maintainer seems redundant to me. Also: smaller repos like the mobile clients don’t have different maintainer for different files.
From my point of view, it just should be transparent and documented somewhere who are the persons actually maintaining a particular project. If the information can be found on PullApprove that would be completely fine. But as the information is IMHO currently not so easy to find it would be good to document this somewhere (e.g. within the README.md or the MAINTAINERS file?).
Also, it would be good if we could agree on a common approach for all repositories within the openhab organization.
Hey @pfink, I agree that it’ll be useful to know who the maintainers are. Especially for other maintainers that need to make changes that might affect something in a different repo.
