Ah, unloved plugins. We've known for a while that this is a problem in
Maven. Sometimes they remain stable, sometimes not but either way nobody
is looking at them. I just got prodded to review the ejb plugin (which
I've never worked on) and saw that of the 10 outstanding issues 6 were
dupes or won't fix, 2 had apparently working patches and the other 2
were trivial. Vincent is looking at applying, testing and releasing this
now.

A while back we assigned plugin maintainers to all the plugins (and I
got lumped with the ones nobody wanted). I did a particularly poor job
of looking after my plugins that I no longer use, let alone those I
never did. All plugins should be like clover, getting buglist attention
and releases when appropriate.

I'd like to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes with Maven2, so here
is what I'm proposing:

- We get volunteers for people to be plugin maintainers. This just means
managing the buglist and applying patches, not necessarily having to fix
issues (though it would be helpful!) They should also watch out for
highly voted for or particularly often duplicated issues to get them fixed.
- In the month leading up to Maven's report to the board (every 3
months), each plugin maintainer should ensure the buglist is up to date
and post a summary to the dev list. This really doesn't take more than
an hour every 3 months, maybe less if you are already on top of it -
you'd just be pasting the little component window out of JIRA for each,
which you can have set up on a dashboard.
- If ever a maintainer wants to step down, they can, and we'll
distribute the plugins among the others.
- We do this for Maven2 plugins now, and keep m1 as is until they are
built on top of the m2 plugins

I'm BCC'ing the mojo community as I'd like to see a similar practice
there. Please reply to [email protected] only.

What do folks think? Is it too heavy handed, or just enough to ensure it
gets done? Is quarterly enough?

I'm also open to suggestions on how to manage JIRA. I think the
project-per-plugin approach is pretty good, once past the hurdle of
setting it up. I wouldn't want to recreate for the Maven2 plugins so my
hope is that come the final release, we can have m1 using the m2 plugin
where possible, or otherwise dev on the m1 plugin ceases (we get all the
bugs fixed and closed, and leave it as is).

- Brett

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