Hey Glyph and everyone, Am 29/04/2017 um 4:02 schrieb Glyph:
This doesn't mean that I won't be contributing to Twisted at all as part of my job (in fact I probably have something coming later this month), just that since I no longer work for an infrastructure provider, "open source qua open source" is no longer part of the job description.
As such, I've been contributing to Twisted somewhat less lately, and I expect that contribution to further decline at least for a while.
Rather than this just resulting in an overall decrease in activity, I wanted to send an explicit message asking the community for help, to try to use this as an opportunity. In the past, when prominent members of the project (myself included) have stepped back, others have stepped in to fill the void, and this has often been the catalyst for significant community growth. However, this has always been a slow, organic process, because core project members (again, myself included) haven't always been clear about when they were going to be active.
That's a sad thing, seeing I was getting used to reading you _everywhere_. But I highly appreciate your forwardness and specially you paving the way for your somewhat stepping down!
So, if you are wondering, "what can I do for Twisted"?
1. If you area already a commit member with repo:write, you know what to do. Get cracking. 2. Reply to this message. Let's get a conversation going. Maybe someone else has some good ideas. 3. Check out https://twisted.reviews. The one advantage of remaining on Trac (as opposed to moving fully to Github) is that you can see at a glance, by looking at which rows are not greyed out on that report, what tickets that you have the ability to submit an authoritative code review for. The rule is: external contributors can review stuff submitted by project members. 4. Our main hosted machine now supports Docker! Volunteer for some operational responsibilities, or move more of our infrastructure into containers so that more of the maintenance work can be reliably tested by folks without permissions to access the actual infra. Have a look over at https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid. 5. Everyone's favorite owl also seems to have been somewhat more busy with non-Twisted stuff of late: volunteer to be a release manager to keep our pace of releases up! 6. Finish porting us to Python 3. We are very, very close: http://blog.habnab.it/twisted-depgraph/
I _was_ wondering "what can I do for Twisted?"! So I'm shamelessly applying your number 2 and adding to the list what I have noticed. Please note: I mean any critiques in the most constructive way and out of the respect I have for the team and the love I've grown to have for the framework. 7. Documentation *needs* an update. This goes mainly for everything that can be found on twistedmatrix.com. And very specifically for the developer docs. As a symptom: I don't recall having seen any reference to the "twisted.reviews" domain anywhere! Right now, the project depends heavily on _a lot_ of implicit knowledge, which is quite frustrating for newcomers (hi!). 8. The website has to be restructured. Some things _are_ there, somewhere, documented in some obscure wiki page linked to from some wiki page three levels deep. As an anecdotal, but surely representative example: I've spent hours in Twisted's docs and webpage and right now I'm reading the DocumentationAnalysis page [1] for the first time. I think the essence expressed in [1] is critical for the future of the project, yet besides existing and having an email without replies on the mailing list [2], that's all there is to it. Stuff like this has to be more prominent! 9. A clear path for Contribution has to be established. Yes, there is Wiki page dedicated to that but I think it can be improved a lot. As, again an anecdotal but representative example: I've been trying to fix #9100 [3] [4] it's an easy one (that's why I picked it), yet even when reading the documentation for contributors, I missed a few things that have complicated the process. And here is the thing: I am actively trying! This basically means, if somebody sees a bug in Twisted that is easy to fix, they won't. Or they will, it just won't end up reaching Twisted's trunk. Moving the load away from core developers starts by making the contributing process easier for external contributors, with Glyph kind of gone, this will be even more important (0.8 core contributors less!). The following is based on the PR for #9100 [4] and a couple others [5] [6], from the POV of an external contributor: - Bug is reported - Bug is fixed by someone - PR is made - Comments are made - Comments are discussed / implemented - Stuff works - PR remains open without further comments. - External contributor forgets about Twisted and moves on or waits indefinitely, while they could be fixing more stuff. This could be because of a lack of active core-developers, which leads me to: 10. "Project Governance", which has already been indirectly raised by Glyph this week when presenting Tom Most (welcome, and thanks!). Who works on twisted? When? Are they active? Partially active? What do they do? What needs to be worked on? How does Twisted as an organisation work? All of these are questions that don't seem too important when it comes to code, but they extremely relevant when it comes to the project and when it comes to users deciding Twisted over other options. I explain further: if person A at company X uses Twisted and they have the feeling, that Core-Developers are overwhelmed, person A could put pressure in company X to get some of their time going to helping out in Twisted. But if they don't know this, they can't. And if they knew this, how would they? Notice that I said "uses Twisted", Twisted is quite mature and it is very possible to use it for a long time without hitting bugs. That's why the health of the project (as opposed to the code) needs to be visible from the outside, to non Twisted developers (either core or external). 11. Twistedchecker: from what I've been reading in open PRs, right now it may be doing more harm than good. What's the coding standard? testAll? test_all? Twistedchecker says something, documentation says nothing. Core developer says something different. What About newlines? Same issue. This is also a key point in getting stuff done by non-core developers; if they can't trust the tools to help them produce a worthy patch, why bother? As a side question: do core-developers use twistedchecker? I would have imagined these issues would have resulted on bug tickets that do not (yet) exist. 12. Bug discussion integration between Github and Trac? Discussion about bugs is taken place on GitHub. At least about bugs someone is working on. This makes sense, since the workflow involves a PR and GH makes reviewing easier, that's where it ends being discussed. Why is this a problem? Well, anyone who is not familiar with Twisted's development will judge this from Trac: - Oldest bug is #50. Open for nearly 16 years. - There is nearly no discussion on newer bugs. - Bugs that get closed, have usually no discussion. - Therefore, users are being neglected. That's, of course, an exaggeration and over-simplification; but the point stands for outsiders. Some integration could mitigate that. That being said, I could help with some things for a few hours a week. I just... you know, can't. I guess, since I'm hijacking threads, I might as well go all-in and ask for Wiki edit permissions to begin with. PS: This email got so long, my bread was burning in the oven! Sorry about that, but I hope it is somehow beneficial. [1]: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/DocumentationAnalysis [2]: http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2005-May/010386.html [3]: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/9100 [4]: https://github.com/twisted/twisted/pull/769 [5]: https://github.com/twisted/twisted/pull/740 [6]: https://github.com/twisted/twisted/pull/747 -- Evilham