Looking for New Maintainers

[shiftkey]

With the passage of time the previous maintainers have moved on to other things, which is how I find myself again filling these shoes. I'm trying to avoid new responsibilities at the moment, and Scientist.NET is not something I am suited to be taking charge of:

• I've not contributed to the project in any capacity
• I'm not aware of this being used on any GitHub projects
• I'm no longer doing C# development

And so I'm now looking out for others to take up ownership of the project. If I don't hear anything before February 4th, I plan to archive the repository to confirm it's dormancy.

This project has been rather quiet for a while in terms of issues and contributions, which is why I favour archiving currently. Here's a cursory glance at the 2018 activity:

• two issues opened
• three PRs merged
• one open PR outstanding

The 2.0 release went out about 8 months ago, and here's the overall NuGet stats:

But if someone (preferably multiple people, to share the load) wants to step up but isn't quite sure I'm happy to provide guidance and mentoring whenever I have bandwidth, but I would love to get to a spot where we have people who know the project and want to actively work on it in charge.

The rough transition process I have in my head is:

• identify interested contributors and figure out a proper transition process
• transfer this repository to a different owner/location on GitHub - it doesn't make sense to have this under the GitHub organization when it's not actively used in GitHub's projects
• identify other systems they need access to to continue publishing releases - CI systems, NuGet, etc

Feel free to ask any question you may have here, or you can email me - handle [at] this website - if you wish to talk privately.

[shiftkey]

@vcsjones mentioned the .NET Foundation as a potential home for this project. I'd need to get familiar with the details about onboarding a project because there aren't really any processes currently 🤔🤔🤔🤔

[SteveDesmond-ca]

I agree that foundation ownership would be ideal, but if for whatever reason that doesn't seem like a good fit, I'm happy to help carry the torch going forward -- I don't have any direct contributions to date, just a happy user!

[shiftkey]

I don't have any direct contributions to date, just a happy user!

I'll quote some of the Twitter discussion I've had since I shared this link into here for reference:

Maybe. We don't want .NET Foundation to be a dumping ground for unmaintained projects, though - project applications include info about roadmap, maintainer team, etc.

— Jon Galloway (@jongalloway) January 21, 2019

One other point on the .NET Foundation: If people want to step forward to run it, but are concerned that they need help. .NET Foundation advisory council folks *will* provide guidance. As Jon said, we would want people to step up willing to lead.

— Bill Wagner (@BillWagner) January 21, 2019

That last quote from @BillWagner here is key:

As Jon said, we would want people to step up willing to lead.

It doesn't matter to me that you haven't contributed - someone who is passionate and knows the library well would be a great help to keep things moving! And I'm happy to help figure out what needs to be in place to apply to the Foundation.

Full disclosure: I'm a member of the Advisory Council that Bill mentioned in his tweet.

[BillWagner]

Full disclosure: I'm a member of the Advisory Council that Bill mentioned in his tweet.

I am also on the Advisory Council.

[haacked]

The fact that you're a happy user makes you qualified in my book. I ported Scientist to .NET in anticipation that it would benefit the .NET community and that I would have needs for it. But in practice, I never actually implemented it in any project. So I really relied on those who were actually using it for a lot of guidance and feedback.

If you're interested in committing to it and running it, you're probably a great candidate.

[haacked]

Since some folks asked on Twitter, here's what is entailed by being the repository maintainer. Overall, this library has a limited tight focus. That means there's isn't a huge amount of work to do. Typical work is just a few hours a month if that. What I would do is the following:

1. Review and triage issues.
2. Review Pull Requests and merge in the changes I felt were appropriate.
3. Cut new releases on NuGet.
4. Reap in and spend all the PROFIT! (aka $0)

In terms of the direction of the project and who should take it over, I have no skin in that game any longer. Here are my suggestions:

1. Track the feature set of github/scientist (but in a manner idiomatic to .NET)
2. Fix any bugs that come up.
3. Consider the project mostly done and not make too many big changes. Mostly maintenance here and there.

Again, I'm no longer a GitHub employee so I don't set the direction. I'm not sure anyone is actively working on github/scientist either. My guess is that both of these projects are mostly "done."

[zoalasaurusrawr]

I’d happily throw my hat in the ring. I’ve recently adopted this at work and we love it. As an addon package to this repo, I’ve also begun working on multiple result publishers and visualization of results.

[shawnwildermuth]

I'm also happy to throw my hat in the ring (as a contributor or a owner). Let me know. I have time and interest.

[zoalasaurusrawr]

I'll add that no matter who gets it, I'm committing to contribute to this repo regardless. I just wanna see this live :)

[M-Zuber]

https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OGC.ae64c1edcfdef4691945222464d4fe58&pid=Api&rurl=https%3a%2f%2fmedia.giphy.com%2fmedia%2fKJ1phNNcxOog0%2fgiphy.gif&ehk=WiCZZfbWJ5Kb95Qy7y%2bUdA
I'd be honored to be part of a maintenance team as well

[paulbreen]

I'll throw my hat into the ring as well.
We're using Scientist.net quite heavily in work.

[hutchcodes]

I hadn't heard of Scientist.net until yesterday and I'll never refactor a critical path without, and I'm also happy to throw my hat in the ring. Mostly I'm just glad to see that this won't be left unmaintained.

[jongalloway]

This is looking good for a list of maintainers, great to see the response. @shiftkey, if you want to go ahead with .NET Foundation application, next steps are:

1. Get the new maintainers added to a GitHub maintainers team for this project
2. Get me the new project questionnaire, doesn't have to be perfectly filled out, check with me if you've got questions.
3. Part of the application requires getting e-mail addresses from the top contributors so they can sign off, since there's no CLA on this repo. Looks like the top 3 contributors should cover it, and I think we know how to find @haacked...