[Gluster-devel] Responsibilities and expectations of our maintainers

[Niels de Vos]

Hi all,

With many new features getting merged for glusterfs-3.7, I would like to
get your attention to some of the more 'boring' bits that come with
proposing and implementing a feature.


1. Who is going to maintain the new features?

    Features that are pretty self-contained, like adding a new xlator,
    daemon or the like, should get added to our MAINTAINERS file. Only
    very few features have provided patches for this, the others would
    need to still do so, or we can collect a bunch of them and add them
    all at once (might be easier to prevent conflicts).
    
    Some features only add some functionality to existing components. If
    the current component maintainer asks your support for maintaining
    your added changes, please be very responsive.


2. Maintainers should be active in responding to users

    As a maintainer of a component, you (or the group of maintainers)
    have the (end) responsibility to respond to questions and problems
    reported by users. This does not mean that you are required to
    respond to all questions and problems yourself, but try to track
    responses by others and answer outstanding questions.
    
    There are several ways our community users can ask questions and
    report problems:
      - gluster-users at gluster.org, gluster-devel at gluster.org lists
      - #gluster and #gluster-dev on Freenode IRC
      - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=GlusterFS
    
    Maintainers are expected to keep an eye on relevant topics,
    questions and bugs through these channels.


3. What about reported bugs, there is the Bug Triaging in place?

    Indeed, at the moment we have a weekly Community Bug Triage meeting.
    This meeting is intended as a fall-back for bugs that have not been
    triaged by community members (users, developers, managers, ...). It
    seems that most new bugs get triaged during the meeting, but this is
    an activity that can happen completely independently from the
    meeting. Maintainers and developers are strongly encouraged to
    triage bugs that are reported against the components that they work
    on. The following links contains the workflow for triaging, and
    bugzilla queries that show the untriaged bugs:
     - http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Bug_triage
     - https://public.pad.fsfe.org/p/gluster-bug-triage
     - http://www.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-devel/2015-March/044114.html

    Reminder: anyone is welcome to join the Bug Triage meeting.


4. Maintainers should keep an eye on open bugs affecting their component

    When a bug has been triaged, someone would need to work on getting
    the problem fixed. Bugs move their status like this:

        NEW -> NEW+Triaged -> ASSIGNED -> POST -> MODIFIED -> ...

    What happens after MODIFIED is for the release maintainers and QA
    (also community) teams. Maintainers would mostly focus on the first
    steps of the process. To assist with this, I have created a Bugzilla
    report where you can click on the component, or the component/status
    and get a list of all bugs (without FutureFeature keyword):
     - http://red.ht/1BKWsRq

    There is still an ongoing action item to find someone that has a
    good overview of how busy developers (mostly Red Hat) are and which
    community reported bugs should get fixed with priority. Maintainers
    are not expected to be managers that can force other developers to
    work on certain issues, but in most cases a friendly request does
    the trick too ;-)


5. Maintainers are expected to be responsive on patch reviews

    When a developer posts a patch to Gerrit, they are eager to hear
    about any changes they would need to make. Responding fast with a
    review also helps in getting the posted change updated quicker.
    Developers tend to switch between many tasks and having the change
    fresh in their memory helps with their responsiveness too. Our
    Guidelines for Maintainers list a few ways on how to receive email
    notifications and displaying a list of changes in Gerrit:
     - http://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Guidelines_For_Maintainers


6. Maintainers should try to attend IRC meetings

    There is the weekly Gluster Community meeting on IRC. This is
    scheduled for every Wednesday. Maintainers and active developers are
    expected to attend these meetings whenever they can. More
    information about these meetings can be found here:
     - https://public.pad.fsfe.org/p/gluster-community-meetings


Note that these are mostly the expectations I have of maintainers, and I
try hard to fulfill them myself too. Let me know if you have any
questions, objections, additions or ideas about this topic. When you
reply, do so by inlining or bottom-posting your comments and feel free
to trim unrelated parts of this email in your response.

Thanks,
Niels
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