Re: The end of an era, and the dawn of a new one

On 07/12/2012, at 3:32 AM, Ian Lynagh wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 12:32:05PM +0000, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
>> (Narrowing to cvs-ghc for now.)
>> 
>> Speaking for myself, I would welcome a code-ownership model along the lines that Ben suggests. If it works well it would
>>  a) spread the load
>>  b) broaden a genuine sense of ownership
>>  c) because of (a) and (b), perhaps encourage more people to participate
>> 
>> What do others think?
> 
> "owner" is a very strong word: I think other projects have had problems
> where e.g. owners have found themselves without time to deal with
> patches submitted, but have been unwilling to let anyone else touch
> "their" code.

Personally, I don't think we'll have problems with this. A prerequisite for code ownership would be to have an account on d.h.o and I think (almost) everyone on that list knows each other personally.

A point about using the "owner" label is that it makes the person directly responsible for the quality of their code base. I think up until now the "contributors" have been working under a pretence of "I'll help out where I can, but it's not really my responsibility". In contrast, if you make someone a code owner you trust them to be committed to the good of the project.

We would want the new code owners to make an initial time investment in going though and cleaning up / understanding their code. If that means they're not prepared to accept some half-baked patches due to the increased maintenance burden, then so be it. I think GHC HQ occasionally palms off contributed patches for this reason anyway.


> We actually already have something similar to this proposal here:
>    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors
> although it's quite out-of-date, mostly because people tend to fade away
> rather than have a definite date on which they stop maintaining
> something.

Having a specified end-date is a good idea. Maybe people should take ownership of some code for periods of one year at a time, and then don't need to feel bad if their circumstances change and they don't have time for it anymore.

Ben.