David Golden wrote:
BINGOS does many CPAN releases for PTG modules for a number of years
now but he rarely writes code. In PAUSE, there is a concept of
owner, and comaint. Do these have relevance to who is the owner of a
PTG module?
I would distinguish PTG the Github organization from "toolchain
maintainers" more generally/socially. PTG is a facility for
collaboration. It reflects the social collaboration agreements among
people who contribute to toolchain modules.
The social organization is decentralized. In recent years, venues like
#toolchain and the QA hackathons and this list (and sometimes p5p) have
been where differences get debated and courses of action set.
There is a group of people who have official power, people who are
trusted with limited power, and a group of very interested members of
the public. It is a venn diagram. Who is in PTG with limited power, who
is an admin of PTG, who is on IRC in #toolchain, who is on SO/PMonks,
who posts in GH/RT, and who shows up to QAH, are all different
overlapping circles. The social organization is decentralized, but PAUSE
absolutely isn't, you mention things supporting in the next paragraph
and 3rd/4th/5th paragraph quotes. You (alone out of 6?) seem to support
the idea that the PAUSE releaser is the owner of a module, not the
limited power 30 PTG members, or the 6 PTG admins (and you xdg are one
of the 6).
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
I find any "Author" section in PTG module pod to be years or a
decade out of date. Is the Pod's author the "owner" of the module
and still responsible for it even though it is under PTG care?
The author section accumulates. I personally consider the last person
to ship to CPAN to be the person "on the hook" for any given module
unless they specifically say they are stepping down from that role.
(Ideally, by making someone else the primary maintainer on PAUSE.)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If a PTG module is always released by one person, and nearly every
commit is by one person, page after page on GH, year after year,
XDG's modules for example, it is obvious that he, and not the PTG
collective is the owner of that.
By putting my modules on PTG, I'm explicitly taking myself out of the
critical path for their development.
I dont know why you mean by "critical path". Do you mean that you will
defer to the community over sub names, sub arguments, POD, module deps,
and tabs vs spaces instead of your own opinion?
If you spend the hours responding to tickets, writing patches, and
making CPAN tarballs, other PTG people will still wait for your
response, instead of pushing to the repo, and upload a new CPAN alpha
tarball within 90 seconds.
When a module is "donated" to PTG, is the donator still the owner of
the module, or is PTG collectively now the owner and author of the
module, and original owner can not be blamed for anything that
happens under PTG development model?
PTG (the org) is a vehicle to facilitate collaboration. By putting it
there, an author is inviting any of the PTG members to hack on it. It
doesn't mean anything about "ownership".
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
In my opinion, the only place of record for ownership is PAUSE. If
there is one person to look to, that's the person listed as primary
maintainer. Co-maints are also responsible parties, though many are
inactive in practice.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What are the responsibilities of a PTG member who cuts a CPAN tarball?
Are they a cron job whose only purpose is to bump version numbers
and verify the changelog contains a new version number, or are they
required to review the git history (and perhaps GH issues/PRs) since
the last CPAN release?
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
As I said already, don't think of it as "PTG member". The PAUSE author
who uploads is responsible for quality.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Is PTG a secret society?
PTG is a shared code repository. What anyone says or commits doesn't
imply any endorsement by other members.
*******cut********
For P5P, there is RJBS as the scapegoat, who is the scapegoat for PTG?
The owners group are the scapegoats for the technical (and social)
issues involved in running a shared code repository. It has nothing to
do with the ownership of modules.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Personally, I consider the PAUSE primary maintainer to the be the owner
of record and thus scapegoat and no one should remain in that role
unless they are willing to take that responsibility.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
My answers to the following questions represent my personal opinion.
I'm not speaking as a "PTG owner" or anything.
Again the problem is, PTG is everyone, but no one. Since governance and
management are tough questions with not rosy answers, nobody wants to
respond.
Leon Timmermans wrote:
Who has the root password to the PTG github account to add and
remove members from that list? I'll assume there is more than 1
person.
Andy, Ricardo, Schwern, mst, xdg and me. I do not consider us the owners
of PTG in any way, more like caretakers.
Unless all 6 people respond, there is no governance since 1 out of 6
people speaking changes nothing. I'll thank leont and xdg for responding
in detail, but they are still 2 out of 6, or 2 out of 30, or 2 out of
40-50, depending which circle you pick as the definition of "toolchain
gang".
