AW: [Metafacture] Metafacture governance

[Böhme, Christoph]

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
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