Remove inactive maintainers from MAINTAINERS.txt

We should probably also revisit all the modules we assigned to people in the "all modules need maintainers" phase we where in earlier this year - I am not sure if they are now active in those module categories.

Also seems somewhat odd killes is listed as topic coordinator of Translations - I would guess that is Gábor.

Also perhaps, this can have some more indenting that sun introduced earlier to show some groupings its quite hard to read, ref #621618: Revamp MAINTAINERS.txt

RE Doug Green - I'm quite certain he has not done anything on Search for a long time, and that Search is an orphan in need of a maintainer.

Jacine created an issue several months ago to have her name removed: #1621784: Remove Jacine from Maintainers.txt

#1969162: Add Twig makers of awesomeness to MAINTAINERS.txt removed dvessel

#2056625: Recruit pwolanin and jhodgdon as official search.module maintainers for search.module

Also, for the missing modules/systems that have no maintainers and/or are not listed at all:
#2050477: [META] Identify component maintainers for components with no maintainer listed in MAINTAINERS.txt
Let's keep this issue here for the "people who shouldn't be listed any more" part?

So maybe this is more accurate?

Has anyone reached out to the guys identified in the issue summary to see if they're still willing/interested in maintaining their part of core?

The more relevant question for the people in the issue summary is whether they've been contributing to the issues in the area they are supposedly maintaining. Just saying you are willing to maintain it is not enough -- we need evidence that it is actually happening. At least one of them said they would maintain modules in Drupal 7, but they didn't actually do anything.

xjm did a nice survey for the field type sub-modules on
#1823042: Add maintainers and d.o components for all field type modules
and I think that unless a similar survey here turns up people who have been active, they should just be removed as maintainers.

Yeah, sorry. Poor choice of wording.

As I've stated, we are currently contacting maintainers individually, one on one, to see if they are interested in maintaining these components in D8 and able to meet the expectations. Let's postpone on that, please, as a courtesy to these contributors.

Is this still in the works?

updated

For my part, I'm comfortable stepping aside as Accessibility Topic Coordinator. Mike Gifford would remain on in that position. Jesse Beach, who is a JS component maintainer, also contributes heavily to accessibility.

I was able to be a lot more active in the D7 cycle than in D8, both for family reasons and because of new assignments at pixotech.com. I'm still passionate about accessibility, and I chime in and roll patches when I can, but not at the maintainer level.

@bowersox, awesome! Can you file a new core issue with a patch that adds you in that list, so that the other maintainers can review and approve it?

I think we are ready to reactivate this and file subissues.

tagging. being referenced in LA talk https://events.drupal.org/losangeles2015/sessions/drupalorg-changes-supp...

I'm not sure where to post this but given that @xjm has a new roll as core committer(yay!!!) and being a release manager of D8(for quite a while now) we could remove her name form "Core mentoring leads" and maybe add a new name, which @YesCT can nominate, who has been actively helping with core mentoring imho.

PS: I have huge respect for @xjm and what she had done as a core mentor and we have seen her become a great core committer but it's not about removing here form the list, it's about showing an appreciation towards the volunteers who have helped, a lot of new core contributes, in becoming the part of this Drupal community which we all love so much.

@jibran, no, I am still involved in core mentoring at a high level and planning capacity. We have monthly meetings that YesCT and I organize and lead. I'm not inactive. We are looking into adding other leads though, but that is not in scope for this issue.

@xjm well then, in that case ignore my comment. I'm sorry for my ignorance.

I added a few frontend related maintainers who I don't think are active right now.

Isn't there a plan to contact everyone in MAINTAINERS.txt and make sure they actually are willing to fulfill the now-defined role of Maintainer for their module, theme, or subystem? This seems like a better process than people listing who they think has not been around for a while in this issue. I think there's even a separate issue for it, but maybe not.

+1 for contacting the people we want to remove and ask them if they are willing to fulfill there role of maintainer.

I think Jennifer is saying contact everyone currently listed (not just the people being identified as inactive) to make sure they are active and are willing to continuing being a maintainer.

Yes indeed, that is what I meant. Maintainers have newly-enumerated responsibilities, with time frames associated with them. We should not have people in MAINTAINERS who do not want to fulfill those responsibilities.

While I have been following D8 passively, due to other life committements I was not (and won't be soon) able to play an active role. So, of course I am in favor of having myself removed from the MAINTAINERS.txt in Drupal 8.

I think before contacting people it would be good to think about whether there should be some kind of interim status between (a) full maintainer and (b) not in MAINTAINERS.txt at all.

To take an example, I don't really want to say to the maintainers of OpenID, Overlay, or Field UI "thanks for jumping in and helping to fix security issues in https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2015-002 (especially that OpenID one which almost no one else would have had a clue how to fix) but unless you agree to do more we're taking your name out of MAINTAINERS.txt"...

I think there is room for a status like "security maintainer" or "maintainer emeritus" (or maybe those are the same thing?) or something along those lines.

i agree with David_Rothstein, would be good to have an additional status.

This is the question of philosophy that we need to decide:

Is MAINTAINERS.txt a document that shows the current maintainers for the version of Drupal that is being downloaded, or is it a document that shows the history of who provided major architecture guidance or maintainership in the past?

The current proposal is that MAINTAINERS lists active maintainers, which I personally think is the right thing to do if the name of the file is "MAINTAINERS.txt" not "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.txt". But clearly, we also need some other place to honor the people who made Drupal what it is.

Agreed, jhodgdon. But there is an area inbetween that David highlighted, which is the maintenance/support in a legacy-type capacity.

Ah, I see I partially misread David's post.

I think #30 is extremely important.

#30 seems to fit within the (apparent?) definition of a maintainer as someone whom to contact in case of significant issues, and within the maintenance stages of software releases (feature support > bug fixes > security fixes only). It doesn't only make sense, but I agree with @David_Rothstein and @tim.plunkett that it's of the utmost importance to know whom to ask about decisions made a long time ago.

@jhodgdon proposed an additional text file for acknowledgements/credits/attributions. While this is initially out of scope, it may be worth considering adding such a file in this issue after all, as it would seemingly make the decision-making process easier, while at the same time we make sure no names are lost (between this issue and follow-ups) of the people who contributed a significant amount of time and responsibility.

I'm in favor of keeping people who worked on a version, in that version's maintainers.txt, but marking them somehow, like past maintainer, or emeritus or something.

one big advantage of doing that is that it keeps a list of people which are really knowledgable of for example reasons which lead to certain decisions, which is non trivial to figure out by using git blame.

I don't have strong feelings about the mechanism, but big +1 to tracking both "person to contact for support" and "person who knows a lot because they wrote it", which are frequently not the same thing.

I imagine we could generate a site that parses the history of maintainers.txt and compiles a list of past and present maintainers. Then we can keep maintainers.txt tidy and up-to-date. We can even use the git history to track when they were added and removed, that may help figure out who to contact for historical context.

Having a list of the people with institutional knowledge throughout the history of a release makes sense. We do need to make sure we have separation between who the contact people are right now versus in the past. Putting that in a different file might be good, so the maintainers file doesn't becomes twice as big. If it is put in the same file, some additional formatting would be good. Maybe a list added just below the active maintainers of a component and indented, so it is easier to scan the file and sections.

Agreed with @Crell. I am happy to help by supplying knowledge of parts I wrote (which are many) but I do not wish to actively work on anything.

Edit: this is no longer true. Good luck with core development, I don't want to talk to anyone lest they find a reason to be insulted which people seem to have grown to be experts of.

OK, here's a concrete proposal.

----
a) At the top of the "Subystem maintainers" section, where it says:

The Drupal Core subsystem maintainers oversee the development of Drupal
subsystems. See https://www.drupal.org/contribute/core-maintainers for more
information on their responsibilities, and to find out how to become a subsystem
maintainer. Current subsystem maintainers for Drupal 8:

Change the last phrase to say:

Current subsystem maintainers are listed below; in some cases, past maintainers and architects are also listed (these are people who are not actively maintaining the code, but who participated substantially in its development):

b) In individual entries where we need to make the distinction between the current and past maintainers, do something like this:

Foo module
Current maintainers:
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
Past maintainers/architects:
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones

----

Thoughts?

How long would we leave someone in the "emeritus" list? Only those still active, or is that a permanent historical record? (Many FAPI maintainers have come and gone and no longer have anything to do with Drupal, for instance.) The list could potentially get quite long. :-)

Good question. If the purpose is "Provide a list of people who could be consulted", then it should be people who are willing to be consulted. If the purpose is "Honor those who contributed", then the answer would be forever. That goes back to some of the earlier discussions about whether this is a current/active document or a contributors list.

The long list is why it might make sense to use an additional emeritus/acknowledgements file instead.

In one file, it starts looking dense.

Foo module
Current maintainers:
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
Past maintainers/architects:
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  
Foo module2
Current maintainers:
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
Past maintainers/architects:
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
- Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
- Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith

Not too easy to scan, so some formatting at least could help.

Foo module
  Current maintainers:
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  - Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  Past maintainers/architects:
  - Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  - Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  
Foo module2
  Current maintainers:
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  - Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  Past maintainers/architects:
  - Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  - Joe Jones 'joejones' https://www.drupal.org/u/joejones
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith
  - Mary Smith 'marysmith' https://www.drupal.org/u/marysmith

Let's put past maintainers on a handbook page?

#47 makes a lot of sense to me

+1 on #47. So in that case, the proposal for how to fix this issue would be:

---
a) Make sure that everyone in MAINTAINERS.txt has agreed to be a "maintainer" as defined in our governance document (triage issues, be active, etc.). Remove everyone else.

b) Make a drupal.org docs page listing past (and current) developers/maintainers for the Core modules and subsystems. We should probably on that page go back in history to previous versions of Drupal as well? It should be placed near/under https://www.drupal.org/contribute/core-maintainers and probably have a URL of https://www.drupal.org/contribute/past-core-maintainers or something similar. We should also add a link in the core-maintainers page to this new page, near where it talks about the MAINTAINERS.txt file. [Actually, this page should also link to the official Governance document too.]

c) At the top of the "Subystem maintainers" section of MAINTAINERS.txt, where it says:

The Drupal Core subsystem maintainers oversee the development of Drupal
subsystems. See https://www.drupal.org/contribute/core-maintainers for more
information on their responsibilities, and to find out how to become a subsystem
maintainer. Current subsystem maintainers for Drupal 8:

Between the second sentence and the "Current subsystem..." phrase, add something like this

See https://www.drupal.org/contribute/past-core-maintainers for a list of people who contributed significantly to the development of subsystems or maintained them in the past, whether or not they are currently serving as subsystem maintainers.

----

Thoughts?

#49+1.

If possible, we should also include vaguely the versions/dates/something that someone was a maintainer. It's good to remember someone who was a module maintainer in 4.6, for instance, but realistically they'll have no idea how to help with the Drupal 8 version of said module. :-)

I'd assume that page to show the current release. There could be sub pages with maintainers for other releases, or at least sections in the page. I don't think we need 10+ years of history for one subsystem all together.

That all sounds good but what about the main part of what I raised in #30? I think I made a mistake conflating that with the idea of past maintainers (it's really two separate issues) so I'm crossing that part out now:

To take an example, I don't really want to say to the maintainers of OpenID, Overlay, or Field UI "thanks for jumping in and helping to fix security issues in https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2015-002 (especially that OpenID one which almost no one else would have had a clue how to fix) but unless you agree to do more we're taking your name out of MAINTAINERS.txt"...

I think there is room for a status like "security maintainer" or "maintainer emeritus" (or maybe those are the same thing?) or something along those lines.

RE #52, my feeling is that having a drupal.org documentation page that lists people who developed the subsystem, with a link in MAINTAINERS.txt, would cover the "let's honor the people who built this" part?

RE #51 - separate pages for each version sounds like a reasonable plan to me.

#53 sounds ok.

I went ahead and made a page of past maintainers: https://www.drupal.org/core/maintainers/past

It might be missing some maintainers who came and went within a release; I diffed against 8.0.0, 7.x HEAD, 7.0.0, and then the branch tip of every branch from 6.x back that had the file. If I've misrepresented your contributions or others it's an accident. :)

Edit: Also it needs the branch maintainers from drumm on back added. :)

And, with that in place, I feel comfortable at least proposing this patch for discussion.

1. +++ b/core/MAINTAINERS.txt
   @@ -51,11 +51,9 @@ Actions
   -- Paris Liakos 'ParisLiakos' https://www.drupal.org/u/parisliakos
   

   Needs a replacement - ?

2. +++ b/core/MAINTAINERS.txt
   -- Moshe Weitzman 'moshe weitzman' https://www.drupal.org/u/moshe-weitzman
   +-?
   

   Other lines have a space between - and ?

Since yched was active as of a year ago, I also emailed him asking if he'd prefer to remain in the list or not. We can probably also check with others in the patch who are still active in Drupal but just not for their core components anymore, like DamZ and Dave Reid and Moshe, but I didn't start that yet.

+++ b/core/MAINTAINERS.txt
@@ -486,21 +465,9 @@ re-architect or otherwise improve large areas of Drupal core. See
-Configuration management
-- Greg Dunlap 'heyrocker' https://www.drupal.org/u/heyrocker

-- Greg Dunlap 'heyrocker' https://www.drupal.org/u/heyrocker
-
-Design
-- Jeff Burns 'Jeff Burnz' https://www.drupal.org/u/jeff-burnz

-- Jeff Burns 'Jeff Burnz' https://www.drupal.org/u/jeff-burnz
-
-Mobile
-- John Albin Wilkins 'JohnAlbin' https://www.drupal.org/u/johnalbin

-- John Albin Wilkins 'JohnAlbin' https://www.drupal.org/u/johnalbin
-
 Multi-lingual
 - Gábor Hojtsy 'Gábor Hojtsy' https://www.drupal.org/u/gábor-hojtsy
 
-Web services
-- Larry Garfield 'Crell' https://www.drupal.org/u/crell

-- Larry Garfield 'Crell' https://www.drupal.org/u/crell
-

Also, I should probably explain that I've updated this section to only include initiatives that are still in progress, so that people know where they can get involved. (Adding new ones since release can be in a separate issue.)

Fixing #59 and a couple other typos.

Adding a link to the page within MAINTAINERS.txt also.

+++ b/core/MAINTAINERS.txt
@@ -3,6 +3,9 @@ encouraged to submit issues and changes (patches) to improve Drupal, and to
+
 

Extra blank line could be removed on commit.

Right, I've done a pretty sucky job at responsibly stepping down, apologies for that :-/

My previous attempt at taking a step back after the D7 cycle didn't turn out too well (blame the back-then shiny new Plugin API - "ooh, OO. Want !"), so this time I forced myself to a STFU-time, without knowing too well how long it would last. Although I'm stll subscribed to a couple issues, and am thrilled to see new efforts arise (yay Entity Layouts), I'll still lay low for the time being.

TL;DR : +1 for removing me from the MAINTAINERS list. Miss you folks, rock on.

Yeah also removing me is the best thing to do..i haven't check aggregator's queue for a few months, my interest has shifted elsewhere.

I hope someone pops up and drive this module where it should be - there is plenty of job to do there.

Thanks a lot to everyone that helped me bring it where it is now!

Cheers

Thanks @ParisLiakos and @yched!

DamZ confirmed he can be removed as well.

Found the issue.

Moshe replied that he would like to try to resume active maintainership of Node Access, User, and the Render API (and revisit in 6 months to check that it worked out), but that he can be removed for Node and Base system. So the attached restores him for the first three components.

David Strauss also wants to remain an active maintainer for MySQL, so the patch is updated to reflect that as well.

msonnabaum also confirmed he is okay with stepping down from active maintainership.

As I constantly failed to find enough time to take care of maintainership during the last months, it's time to re-focus and take action. That said, I'm stepping down as Form and Entity API maintainer, but will continue maintaining the typed data system.

It's been a great journey, but besides work and life there is just not enough room for everything.

Updated the summary with the current status. I've not heard back from Dave Reid; everyone else has either confirmed their updated role in the file or was in the original list from 2013 and did not follow up since then.

I agree with removing these past maintainers from MAINTAINERS.txt -- nice to see them recognized on https://www.drupal.org/core/maintainers/past.

xjm reached out to all the maintainers that we are removing that were previously active in Drupal 8, but not all of them responded. We apologize in advance if anyone was removed mistakenly. Just let us know, and we'll fix it.

The patch looks good so I'm marking this RTBC. Feel free to commit!

Rerolled to resolve a merge conflict from updating the testing framework maintainership.

I found a bad link in the MAINTAINERS.txt at line 179:

- Josh Waihi 'fiasco' https://www.drupal.org/u/fiasco

Correct link is https://www.drupal.org/u/josh-waihi now.

Josh will be removed from the list. So I did not report an issue. But this leads me reached here and followed this issue.

Today I applied the patch to check whether there is a bad link or not.

Fortunately, there is no 404 links any more, but 301 links discovered accidentally.

• https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett -> https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett
• https://www.drupal.org/u/emma.maria -> https://www.drupal.org/u/emmamaria

Wha? Who stole my dot?!

#80 and #81 are both fine in the context of this issue. #81 may be a bit out of scope, but I'll let the committers decide between the two.

Previous patch(#86) is a wrong patch.

As Tim said, maybe #80 is better. Sorry for adding mess here.

@jungle thanks for the latest patch - If the links are redirects we should not be changing them in this issue - it is not part of "Remove inactive maintainers from MAINTAINERS.txt". Also since it is a name and @tim.plunkett has definitely chosen to have a dot I think we should respect that - regardless of what drupal.org has done.

Unfortunately the latest patch doesn't look much like #80.

+++ b/core/MAINTAINERS.txt
-- Earl Miles 'merlinofchaos' https://www.drupal.org/u/merlinofchaos
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

-- Jen Simmons 'jensimmons' https://www.drupal.org/u/jensimmons
-- Emma Maria Karayiannis 'emma.maria' https://www.drupal.org/u/emma.maria

-- Emma Maria Karayiannis 'emma.maria' https://www.drupal.org/u/emma.maria
+- Emma Maria Karayiannis 'emma.maria' https://www.drupal.org/u/emmamaria

-- Yves Chedemois 'yched' https://www.drupal.org/u/yched
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

-- Daniel F. Kudwien 'sun' https://www.drupal.org/u/sun
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett
...
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

-- Daniel F. Kudwien 'sun' https://www.drupal.org/u/sun
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

@@ -325,11 +314,10 @@ Path
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

@@ -357,7 +345,7 @@ Responsive Image
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

-- David Strauss 'David Strauss' https://www.drupal.org/u/david-strauss
-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett

-- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/tim.plunkett
+- Tim Plunkett 'tim.plunkett' https://www.drupal.org/u/timplunkett

Let's leave the dots alone :)

The latest patch submitted by me removed the dot in the profile links which leads to 301 redirect. But that is out of scope here and @tim.plunkett prefer to have the dot, I am totally agreed that we should respect that as @alexpott pointed.

Dear committer, please use #80. Thanks!

Reuploading the correct patch. It should always be the last patch attached to the issue.

Updating issue credit.

#92 Looking good stage.

Committed and pushed 982a790 to 8.3.x and e44d370 to 8.2.x. Thanks!

I credited many of the past maintainers of turned up on this issue to be say it was okay to remove them. Thanks for all of the great contributions :)