[Metafacture] Metafacture governance

Fri Nov 11 17:12:52 CET 2016

Hi Fabian,

thanks for your suggestions. A monthly conference call sounds good. I'm
fine with either Wire or Skype. For chat I suggest stick to good old IRC
using #metafacture on freenode.

The wiki already has page [1] which describes practices for contributing
to metafacture-core. Additionally, I wrote some bits describing
practices for maintainers [2]. It makes sense to move these into a
CONTRIBUTING file instead of hiding them in the wiki. Perhaps someone
wants to take a stab at merging the wiki pages into a file and create a
pull request? We can then discuss the practices there.

I created a pull request for discussing the module reorganisation [3].
Thanks for your input there!

Best,
Christoph

[1]
https://github.com/culturegraph/metafacture-core/wiki/Code-Quality-and-Style
[2]
https://github.com/culturegraph/metafacture-core/wiki/Maintainer-Guidelines
[3] https://github.com/culturegraph/metafacture-core/pull/259

Am 03.11.2016 um 11:24 schrieb Fabian Steeg:
> Hi Christoph,
> 
> thanks a lot for the update on the status of the repo reorganisation and
> the prompt merging of the pull requests. This is great.
> 
> I'm also happy to hear that you'd be willing to add more maintainers. I
> agree that some regular coordination between us would be good. How about
> a regular conference call once a month, plus additional calls as
> required (we currently use Wire, but I guess Skype would also work)? For
> the chat, we could either use IRC (e.g. #metafacture on freenode) or
> maybe Gitter [1], which integrates with GitHub.
> 
> The standards for merging pull requests (and coding conventions for
> contributions from [2]) could go into a CONTRIBUTING.md file, see [3].
> You could put your current practice in such a file, and then we could
> refine and discuss it in pull requests against that file.
> 
> We could discuss the package structure that you proposed in the other
> thread in a similar manner: if you open a pull request that adds the
> metafacture-module-packages.txt into the repo (maybe in a doc/ folder)
> with the mail text as the first comment, we could discuss the details
> using the line comment functionality in GitHub, link to actual code,
> etc. Not sure if that makes sense, but to me it seems that would make a
> detailed discussion easier than having it here on the list, and we'd
> have the result in the repo.
> 
> Thanks for all the work you're putting into Metafacture, I'm excited to
> move forward together :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Fabian
> 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitter
> [2]
> https://github.com/culturegraph/metafacture-core/wiki/Code-Quality-and-Style
> 
> [3]
> https://help.github.com/articles/setting-guidelines-for-repository-contributors/
> 
> 
> On 26.10.2016 14:08, Böhme, Christoph wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> thanks Fabian, bringing the issue up again. The lack of maintainer
>> resources is indeed a problem. From my perspective, however, not so
>> much in terms of merging pull requests but more in terms of general
>> code maintenance and development of a coding standard and planning.
>>
>> This became apparent, when I tried to reorganise the Culturegraph
>> repositories earlier this year as we discussed at last year's SWIB.
>> This failed completely because the classes and packages of
>> metafacture-core project depended heavily on each other so that it was
>> not possible to separate it into independent modules. In Particular,
>> old unit tests turned out to be a major source of trouble as the tests
>> for one Metafacture module often used other Metafacture modules for
>> setting up a test fixture.
>>
>> Because of these problems, I decided to postpone the reorganisation a
>> bit and first prepare a clean-up release. The progress on this release
>> had been quite good and the dependency issues are now mostly solved. I
>> also completed some half-finished features (such as the marc 21
>> handling) which -- I reckon -- would be difficult to merge after the
>> reorganisation. For the same reason I began to merge the open pull
>> requests yesterday. I plan to finish this be the end of the week. My
>> plan is to merge all requests for now, whether or not they introduce
>> new external dependencies or other problems and solve this problems
>> after the reorganisation.
>>
>> As final step for the clean-up release, I thought of changing the
>> packaging structure in metafacture-core so that it already reflects
>> the planned module structure. I'll prepare and send a list later today
>> showing my ideas for reorganising the classes and packages. It would
>> be good if I could get some feedback on this.
>>
>> Coming back to the topic of your email: I am fine with adding more
>> maintainers to the culturegraph-repo. However, I think we also need to
>> introduce some form of coordination between the maintainers (such as a
>> regular meeting, conference call or online chat perhaps) so that all
>> maintainers go into the same direction. Also, over the time I
>> introduced some standards of how I merge pull requests and do other
>> things. I think it is quite helpful to have a standard way of doing
>> these things so that, for instance, merged pull requests appear
>> consistently in log. Hence, I'd like all future maintainers to follow
>> the same standard (that must not necessarily be the current one). I am
>> going to write done the standard I am currently following this week so
>> that we can talk about it.
>>
>> Best,
>> Christoph
>>
>>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>>> Von: metafacture-bounces at lists.dnb.de [mailto:metafacture-
>>> bounces at lists.dnb.de] Im Auftrag von Fabian Steeg
>>> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 20. Oktober 2016 13:20
>>> An: metafacture at lists.dnb.de
>>> Betreff: [Metafacture] Metafacture governance
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> unfortunately, the Metafacture community remains very fragmented. There
>>> are currently 10 open pull requests by 8 different contributors at [1],
>>> the oldest now over 2 years old. Our plan from last year's get-together
>>> at SWIB [2] to allow contributions by modularization did not take off
>>> (Pascal and I would be happy to help implementing that, if there are any
>>> steps we could do).
>>>
>>> The fragmented community remains active though, and both the D:SWARM and
>>> hbz forks are up to date with the culturegraph repo [3]. The main issue
>>> seems to be maintainer resources on the culturegraph repo. To fix that,
>>> I'd like to suggest that the DNB adds maintainers from the D:SWARM (if
>>> they are interested) and hbz teams to the culturegraph repo, so that it
>>> becomes not only the formal central repo, but the actual center of the
>>> Metafacture community.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Fabian
>>>
>>> [1] https://github.com/culturegraph/metafacture-core/pulls
>>> [2] http://etherpad.lobid.org/p/swib15-metafacture
>>> [3] https://github.com/culturegraph/metafacture-core/network
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Fabian Steeg, Software Developer | Linked Open Data, http://hbz-nrw.de
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Metafacture mailing list
>>> Metafacture at lists.dnb.de
>>> http://lists.dnb.de/mailman/listinfo/metafacture
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