Howdy folks! @keathley asked me to kick off this thread to discuss what’s next for Wallaby. As many are aware Chris has decided to step down from being the sole maintainer of Wallaby and has asked others to step up.
There’s been some interest within the Elixir School organization to take over and maintain Wallaby as a community project but before we do anything, both Chris and I wanted to pause and check-in with the other community members.
What do you think about Elixir School taking over the project and adding new community maintainers? Should we consider a new organization altogether that could adopt future projects? If we do the latter, how do we recruit reliable maintainers? Starting a new org could slow the momentum, how do we address that?
We’d both love to hear your thoughts before a final decision is made.
A new org sounds good. I’m not sure that’ll really slow down momentum though. GitHub allows transferring repos which will also facilitate redirects which should prevent any breakdown in existing codebases. Can you share the concerns?
What to call the new org? No clue. I’m happy with elixir-wallaby/wallaby, elixir-school/wallaby or elixir-contrib/wallaby. I’m not going to try to overthink it. Either way, even if it stays where it is, if new repo maintainers have the ability to maintain, then I’m happy.
I’m not sure who all is associated with Elixir School, but seems like good people passionate about Elixir. If those folks want to invite other maintainers on certain repos, that sounds fantastic.
Transferring a repo isn’t much of a concern. There’s some level of effort associated with coming up with a name, transferring repos, updating documentation, getting invites sent to maintainers, and establishing some kind of process by which the organization will operate.
At the end of the day we really want to do is whatever will motivate people to contribute. If that’s a fresh organization then I’m happy to create that org and help build maintainers around it. The latter being the trickier part.
Great goal. Sorry, I don’t have any firm opinions; fresh organization or not, even under the Elixir School org would be great. Learning is also done by contributing so I think it fits; but up to @keathley and the Elixir School at this point. Either way, count me in for being a community maintainer.
Personally I don’t have a preference to where the work happens so long as it continues to be worked on and see the love it deserves.
I don’t think it’ll slow things down too much to move to a new organization on github. Especially since the conversation about doing so is very transparent and should be easily google-able in the coming months/years.
As for finding and recruiting maintainers, the easiest way is to make it as easy and straightforward as possible to contribute, and promote contributing as a means of finding people. Usually this means some strong leadership and direction from the current core team so it’s clear where the project currently is and where it needs to go.
I’d be happy to start working on something for wallaby just not sure what the next milestone will be after the changing of the guard.
