After our meeting yesterday, I took a closer look at our Quick Docs repo and was quite appalled. Either I didn’t look at the repo closely enough beforehand, or I pushed that aside mentally. In any case, changes are urgently needed.
We have 34 open issues, some 3 years old.
We have 9 open PRs, the youngest 3 months old, the oldest 2 years.
But anyhow, in the statistics we have a 50% increase this month, from 1 commit per week to 2 commits.
In this way, we scare away even the last of the few contributors we still have - however well-intentioned and capable of suffering they may be.
The Repo has 38 commiting members. 3 are personal members (@jflory7, @mattdm@pbokoc, repo maintainer and admin). But even from those , who have a emphasized position, no one has felt the need to take care and bring about a solution. It seems to be the typical situation of lack of organization, everyone relies on each other and at the end nothing happens. Some may see themselves as an emergency backup team, but that’s kind of unclear. Others may have other focuses, but that’s also unclear.
On the one hand, we should avoid raising false expectations, and on the other hand, we should set up a comprehensible organizational structure as soon as possible.
We should treat the repo like our repos on GitLab, so “owner” and admin is the docs-admin group.
We should have an “emergency backup group”, if I remember correctly there was / is something like a repo-support group. This clearly does not contribute to the ongoing operations.
We try to create a “QD-QA Team”, 3-5 members would be good, which ensures the PR workflow.
We are retaining a “Special Purpose Committers Group” where those who currently contribute can maintain the usual flow. But we remove those who have not been active for 2 years.
While we are at it, the branch master is renamed to main.
I hope that didn’t come across wrong. In the passage, I wanted to show the organizational problem, that with the unstructured long list of names, we are creating inaccurate expectations and have too little structure so that it is clear who is doing what.
Oh, no problem — I did not even consider that you might have meant it in a negative way. It just made me realize that I probably should remove myself so it doesn’t look like I am paying close attention to something that I wish I had time for but realistically don’t.
Generally, I think migrating Quick Docs from Pagure to GitLab makes sense. It is also a good time to clarify access and permissions.
One thing to consider with Quick Docs is that I think it might be helpful to have a special Docs commit group just for Quick Docs. This would be a good on-boarding point for new contributors to Fedora Docs, and also gives existing maintainers more reassurance that a new contributor can receive access to Quick Docs first before we give someone the keys to the castle, as they say.
This topic was discussed in detail and several times. At least as far as Quick Docs are concerned, this would be a typical Freudian “Uebersprungshandlung” (don’t know the English technical term off the top of my head) and not contribute one iota to solving even one of the minor current problems. On the contrary, Git and our workflow are already scaring off many potential authors. And a completely cluttered and chaotic UX wasteland like our GitLab makes it even more off-putting for professional or authoring skilled contributors.
But let’s put that aside. What would really help is if you do the rename to main. You have, as far as I know, the necessary permissions and also the knowledge about the deployment chain. That would be really great. Please, take #504
Since February, it’s darknao and me who are constantly and continuously working on docs. And it would be superb if this wouldn’t get stuck to darknao again.
That’s group is already in place. The problem is, as a rough guess, 50% or more didn’t make a contribution in the last 1 -2 years. The other did care about 1 - 2 articles they are obviously specialized in. That’s OK, and I’m glad they do. But that doesn’t help us with the issues, PRs, onboarding new contributors or keeping our stock of articles as a whole up to date. The only exception for a long time is @ankursinha. But as a lonely warrior, this is a pretty hopeless or at least draining endeavor. We need to organize additional assistance. And that, among other things, is also a matter of organization.
