TAG: October 12, 2022

• Time: Every second Wednesday of the month, 3:00pm Eastern Time US
• Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/968367412

Host key can be found in the description of the TAG Slack channel.

Attending:

• Seth Shaw (Chair)
• Rosie Le Faive
• Willow Gillingham
• Luke Taylor
• Amy Blau
• Isabella Nikolaidis

Agenda

• Working terms of reference for TAG
  • Who is the representative for TAG in the Leadership Group?
• Deprecation cycle discussion
• LSAP Document Review
  • Is this ready to be brought to the Leadership Group meeting on Friday?
• Working on proposal for how to widen committer group while preserving permissions in codebase
  • This proposal will come back to TAG for review once finalized, but feedback is welcome at this stage!

Meeting Minutes

• Luke can be representative for TAG at LG meetings.
• TAG terms of reference: Isabella to set deadline for comments and feedback as October 19, send reminder.

Deprecation cycle discussion

• Rosie: We have carapace, a theme that no one has touched in years. It also might have security issues. Want to deprecate it and run it through this process.
  • It's not going to break anything - the only thing that we're proposing to do would still cause your git clone to work. It's just you'll get a lot of notifications that this has been deprecated.
• Rosie can add the README.
• Rosie: Do we have to warn the community it will be deprecated? Message suggesting deprecation sent out in July. One 👍 response from Kirsta, nothing else received from community.
• Seth: In this case, we can just do it. Other repos will need a longer cycle to pull out, and need deprecation flags showing up in their code saying it's not used anymore. But since this is a theme, deprecating it won't break it.
• Rosie: In a deprecation cycle, normallly one would have a thing like "we will still do security updates up until this date" but we haven't done security updates to it in years.
• Seth: Seeing as carapace is not being actively used by the community and has not been updated for this period of time, we are moving it to deprecation in recognition of its practical deprecation status.
• Amy: Can add this announcement to tech/IF updates at Open Meeting.

LSAP Discussion

• Rosie: Language indicating specified maintainers. Is this to bring us in alignment with Drupal, having individuals as maintainers? With an author section in a composer.json?

• Seth: Often, may see libraries created by an individual, and when they abandon the project, direct you to a fork that is maintained/active.

  • Drupal is more picky about having an individual as a listed maintainer for a particular thing. However, a lot of those projects are corporate funded projects or individual contributor rather than open source collaborative.

• Rosie: We're both open source communities, we have the people we have either through employment or freelance or volunteer.

• Rosie: Islandora is really big, it's difficult for anyone to be familiar with the full stack.

  • We used to do twice a year a call, where any committer could sing up as maintainer for a module.
    • Their work during the sprint was to make sure PRs went through, shepherd the quality of that particular module.
    • Maybe it would make sense for us to do a yearly sign on for maintainers?

• Seth: Drupal Core has 115 maintainers listed. Core is a wrap around core modules.

  • We have the islandora module where we have a few submodules in it, but if you're a core maintainer, you're responsible for what your particular interest is of those pieces.

• Rosie: For a drupal listing, we would have islandora, islandora_mirador, islandora_controlled_access_terms, jsonld, openseadragon ...

• Rosie: To update committers - follow up ask of would you like to be moved to the emeritus committers?

• Rosie: Re: assigning a maintainer - aspect of if there's a PR or issue with your module, it's on you.

• Luke: Lead committer?

• Seth: Having assigned maintainers can be a way to funnel questions.

  • Can also lead to complacency - I'm not the maintainer, I don't have to worry about that.

• Rosie: Islandora workbench will soon undergo this process - Mike Jordan would like to remain maintainer.

• Amy: For continuity's sake, multiple people should know how to use the repo.

• Seth: Drupal practice: you don't list maintainers in README or in the composer. We do both. At least on core.

• Luke: Could we just list everybody? Have the committers listed as maintainers for each project.

• Seth: Taking core as a model, they don't bother listing.

• Rosie: Maintainer mentions can become out of date and hard to maintain.

• Seth: Confusion of loading the term committers,

  • Committers and code committers - makes there 2 levels of value, does this increase the divide?

• Rosie: Committers were originally intended to be broader than just code committers.

  • Elevate people to committer level for community organization work and documentation work, and give them committer privileges.

• Rosie's Making 'all of us' the maintainers document

• Rosie: Drupal we can worry about later.

• We understand all the committers to be the maintainers of all the islandora owned code and there isn't a need for individuals to be listed as module maintainers.

Action Items

• Isabella to resolve comments on LSAP document, edit language to make group maintenance, and give to Luke with message before Friday LG meeting.
• Deprecate carapace, make announcement
• Leave final comments and feedbag on TAG terms of reference by Oct. 19.