[In response to a request by Peter Rabbitson to keep discussions in the public record, I am resending this email verbatim and adding modules@perl.org to the recipient list. I will follow up with a copy of his reply and my response to that.]
[bcc: PAUSE administrators] Hello, everyone. I'm writing privately on behalf of the PAUSE administrators in response to private and public <http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.modules/2016/09/msg96115.html> communications concerning the succession of primary maintainership of DBIx::Class ("DBIC"). (Please note that Matt Trout has agreed to participate in resolving these concerns only in his capacity as a DBIx::Class maintainer and will not use his PAUSE administrative powers to affect the outcome.) *tl;dr: PAUSE administrators would like you to talk this out.* The rest of this email explains our thoughts and suggests a path forward. When I write "we" or "our", consider that to mean PAUSE admins. I use the term "maintainers" to mean everyone with either primary or co-maintainer permissions for DBIC. *Our position:* (1) Given the importance of DBIC to the broader Perl community (i.e. way " upriver <http://neilb.org/2015/04/20/river-of-cpan.html>"), we’d like to see a more open discussion between existing maintainers about what happens next in terms of DBIC leadership and control of primary permissions. (2) The best outcome from our perspective would be for a successor to be decided by consensus of existing maintainers. (3) Given a dispute among maintainers, the only outcome that is absolutely unacceptable to PAUSE admins would be a unilateral permissions transfer decision. (4) We really hope the DBIC maintainers and/or community can resolve this internally. *Path forward:* I am available personally to mediate discussions if that would help facilitate the necessary conversations. What follows are my personal thoughts on what might help. The "elephant in the room" appears to be hearing who Peter is proposing as a successor and his rationale for choosing that person. Because that reveal hasn't happened, perhaps there are some precursor decisions to discuss first. These might include: - Should succession discussions be done in public or in private? - If private, should anyone other than maintainers be involved? - Is email or some other venue best for the discussion? - Are there project direction/philosophy decisions that need to be resolved first? Regarding public vs. private, I would encourage private discussion of a successor out of consideration for the person(s) involved. Regarding philosophy, I've been made aware of a possible "cathedral vs bazaar" difference of opinion among maintainers about future direction for DBIC. If so, I encourage you all to resolve that separately and possibly publicly within the broader DBIC community before trying to decide on a successor. Regarding the venue: if (virtual) face-to-face chat would help, I can arrange a video conference for us. It's possible that higher bandwidth and hearing voice tone might help compared to purely text conversation. I welcome your thoughts or questions on this note as well as your own thoughts on how to move this forward towards resolution. Regards, David Golden -- David Golden <x...@xdg.me> Twitter/IRC/GitHub: @xdg
