Hi Brian, On Mon, Feb 17, 2025, at 3:00 PM, Brian Okken via pytest-dev wrote:
This got me thinking about the governance and decision process around pytest and pytest plugins that are part of the pytest-dev umbrella.
So, my question is: - What is the pytest governance model? - What about the various pytest plugins under pytest-dev?
Right now there is no strong formal definition, we have some loose definitions here: https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.rst#submitting-p... It touches briefly on pytest itself, but the focus of that section are plugins.
I've not too awfully long ago done some contribution to pytest-repeat, but it's never been really very clear who's in charge.
It seems like we'd need it to be more formal for pytest, and gradually less formal as we go down the list of popularity of plugins, maybe.
Sounds reasonable.
But at the very least, it seems like each plugin in pytest-dev should have a first contact, maybe a second contact, and such, and a process for replacement if/when people become uncontactable.
Indeed. This is something we have paid more attention to recently, trying to always include at least 2 core devs as contributors and PyPI owners. However the waters here are a bit muddled yet, it is common for a plugin to go inactive for a long time and for the original contributors to stop responding to issues/PRs, and then it falls back into us the core maintainers to step in and get the house in order, but most core maintainers are already spread thin over many activities as it is... I'm not sure what a good solution here could be. Just answering some of the questions, but I don't have suggestions on how to move this forward, but thanks for getting this discussion started. Cheers, Bruno