Apparently release 6.0.0 managed to uncover what I was afraid it would do: 
breaking not actively maintained plugins. It was a small issue, but enough to 
cause breakages and chain of dependency pinning for the users.

There was nothing wrong with pytest release process, there was a pre-release 
and also enough time to raise bugs... only if someone would try that 
pre-release before the release was made. Experience told me that less than 
1/1000 users will try it.

Can someone help me bring pytest-html plugin to actively maintained status?
https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest-html/issues/318


For me actively maintained does means it has CI/CD jobs that run scheduled and 
that also tests unreleased versions of its main dependencies, in that case this 
means at least "pytest" (and likely ansi2html too). I used this approach with 
several projects in order to avoid day-zero outages when one dependency makes a 
new release.

That issue also made me discover that there is a gap between the guidelines 
from 
https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst#submitting-plugins-to-pytest-dev
 and the reality.

An external contributor is not able to @mention a maintenance team (in fact no 
proofs that it even exists) so PRs may be lingering for a while or ever without 
knowing who could be able to help moving them. Only practical solution I found 
so far was to dig the commit history and make guesses who is likely to be a 
core, dig for his online contacts and hope he receives your call and happens to 
be available or willing to help.

Sadly is a gambling most of us already do all the day and I am not sure how it 
can be improved. This should not be ignored because most occasional 
contributors are never going to try to contribute again if their initial work 
is not reviewed, making maintenance even harder.


While I am trying to sort the pytest-html issue right now, I do have few more 
generic questions:

How are users expected to contact those with power of making a change on any 
project under pytest-dev organization?

Is this mailinglist the only option?

I personally dislike mailing lists and avoid them. I find them as a 
communication barrier to occasional contributions.  You can only post to them 
if you subscribe, no way to reply to a thread if you were not subscribed when 
original message was posted. 

Why not an online forum, where anyone can do a social login and post a 
message/reply or watch a specific topic he is interested in, without having to 
expose his email and subscribe to far more than he may want? Two easy 
alternatives are either Github discussions (beta opt-in, can provide details) 
or just using https://discuss.python.org/ -- where we could use a category or 
tag, which both can allow subscript, in addition to topic subscription.


I do have a lot of admiration for pytest ecosystem in general and more than 
happy to help it grow.

Cheers
Sorin Sbarnea



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