Hi there, TL;DR: As long as the editor job *requires* manual steps beyond commenting and clicking merge on GitHub [2], it's going to burn people out and I am resigning effective January 1st, 2023.
Over the past few months, I found that I do not particularly enjoy the editor
job anymore. I used to have a rhythm where things worked well, but for
unrelated factors, that rhythm got broken and I cannot reestablish it.
Since then, without a rhythm where the editor work fit in to, it has been a
nuisance to me.
This is mostly because 95% of the editor work can currently be done by a
machine, but it is not being done by a machine. I never liked having to
emulate a machine, because I am really bad at that: I tend to make mistakes
where machines don't make mistakes, and then I hate that and it makes me
unhappy.
I tried, in the past, to automate things better, but I wasn't good at that
either. There was also some backlash at that, which did not help the
Unfortunately, since then, nobody has stepped up to help with the automation.
Unless this changes in some way, I see myself forced to resign for my own
sake.
As I am the only person currently executing active editor duties, despite a
list of six people on [1], this will leave an important part of the XSF (the
standard publishing process) uncovered.
For future reference, what now follows will be a list of pain points (probably
incomplete) and what I think should be done about it. Mind that this is merely
a suggestion; as long as the end goal (everything which can be automated
should be automated) is achieved, the way does not matter.
- XEP-0001 conformance is not checked automatically
-> we should have a CI job which validates that *changed* or *added* files
are conformant; e.g. that protoxeps come with the correct <number> and
<status> values.
- Publishing new documents requires manual docker build + push
-> we should probably move this to GitHub Actions + the GitHub docker
registry, if feasible. due to the complexity, we may run into CI runtime
limits in the free tier though.
- Ensuring versions showing up in the attic is a manual process
-> There should be some automation which detects addition of a <revision>
block, tags the commit, builds the thing and pushes it into the attic
- Ensuring sensibility of commit slicing is a manual process
For the point above to work correctly, it is required that a revision block
is only ever added *after* all changes belonging to that revision. Hence,
it must be enforced that a PR does not change a document in any commit after
the one adding a revision block.
- Triage is completely manual
It would be great to have a summary of things to manually watch out for as
a comment by a bot in the PR.
- Emails are sent non-automatedly
There is tooling to *generate* the emails and to submit them to an SMTP
server, but there's nothing which calls that automatically, and it is
inherently stateful (tricky to get right in CI jobs; I used to have a thing
for that on GitLab using artifacts and caches, but it was fragile).
Things which need to stay manual, and which are *fine* to have a as a manual
process, because they involve actual human judgement:
- Checking if a change is normative (Needs Council if not Experimental)
- Checking if a revision block is needed
- Having to check for approvals by authors (though a CODEOWNERS file for those
who are on github would be pretty nice)
As I do not want to leave the XSF hanging right away, I hereby announce my
resignment, unless something significantly changes about the job, effective
January 1st, 2023.
I hate to do so, because I want XMPP to become even more successful, and I
strongly believe that open standards and federation are the only way to build
sustainable, functional and resilient networks. Yet, this task has drained *so
much* energy over the recent time that it's just not bearable anymore.
I would also discourage anyone from taking on this responsibility until and
unless the stuff above is fixed. It just burns you out (even though you'll
probably be fine for a year or so).
best regards,
Jonas
P.S.: I do realize that I'd be a prime candidate for implementing the
automation. I do have the skillset. I just lack the energy for it [3].
P.P.S.: This is unrelated to a recently needed revert on the xeps repository;
in fact, I wrote this email before I realized that the build had been broken.
[1]: https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/editor-team/
[2]: I'm not saying that it should *require* clicking merge on GitHub.
But having to run the right arcane git commands and other tools in the
correct, machine-detectable order is just not sustainable.
[3]: Yes, I am otherwise fine, thanks for worrying, truly.
I enjoy a lot of other things in life. I just do not enjoy the xeps
repository anymore.
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