Hi Steffen,
>> I hereby give modu...@perl.org permission to grant co-maintainership
>> to [% distribution %], if all the following conditions are met:
>
> Refer to the "PAUSE administrators" instead of modu...@perl.org? A mailing
> list is a weird thing to carry authority. :)
Ah, that's the right label to use then? I've referred to you as the Modules
Cabal in the past,
but "PAUSE administrators" does sound less like a conspiracy. I'll make that
change for the next iteration.
>> As a number of others commented, Andreas feels it should be stated on
>> a per-distribution basis, and not per-author.
>
> Well, ideally, I think, an author should be able to do either one (or both).
> Personally, I'm perfectly willing to hand responsibility to the PAUSE admins
> if I'm not reachable/whatever. I would not want to go through the effort of
> marking each of my 150 or so modules.
Good point. I forgot that there are some über-maints, who have more dists than
I have digits.
We need to think of a good way to handle this. Those using Dist::Zilla could
set up a global profile,
but we need some other mechanism for tagging your PAUSE profile with this...
Maybe instead of just this Covenant, we have a number of Ownership /
Maintenance statements,
one of which is the one I proposed, but another of which would something along
the lines of:
This is my module, I don't want it handing over unless I've either
(a) bestowed (co-)maint using PAUSE
(b) have explicitly given the PAUSE admins permission to bestow
it
And by default everyone could be tagged with this. Much as I might wish that
the default could be
more open, there are clearly people who are more aligned with the above, so
that would have to
be the default.
>> [if you're happy for someone else to take over maint of a dist]:
>>
>> I hereby give modu...@perl.org permission to grant lead authorship
>> to [% distribution %], if the following conditions are met:
>>
>> (1) There are outstanding issues in the module's public bug tracker
>> (2) The requester wants to make worthwhile changes that will benefit CPAN
>
> Not even require an email to the author? Really?
Yes, I think that could be one of the ownership statements. I recently took
over a module where
both previous maints clearly had no interest, but it just took a long time to
determine that fact :-)
>> There are at least three ways this could be provided:
>>
>> (a) a file included in the distribution. Eg Covenant.txt
>> (b) text in the README
>
> META.yml/json!
>
> README is almost useless since it requires somebody to grovel through the
> distribution. It needs to be something that can be automated and displayed on
> some overview page -- like the distribution page for search.cpan.org (and
> metacpan), something akin to "View Permissions" in PAUSE.
Absolutely. I'm having a number of offline discussions with various people, and
one of them is about defining the
right bits of metadata, so metacpan et al can (search | summarise) it.
>> (c) a feature on PAUSE, where you can select the "ownership status"
>> or similar
>
> This would be the place where you mark an author as endorser.
endorser?
>> [...] The alternative would
>> be to email the covenant to modu...@perl.org: that's publicly archived,
>> so your covenant could be found, especially once a convention
>> has been established.
>
> Yeees, keep in mind, though, that modu...@perl.org is read & acted upon by
> only a handful of really rather busy people. More manual work for us is
> likely to lead to work being dropped.
Another good point. Will ponder some more.
thanks,
Neil
