Co-maintainer Best Practices (also Pathauto Co-Maintainers!)

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Pathauto now has 3 maintainers (greggles, mikeryan and Freso).

We've got a couple of practices that we're trying to follow to help coordinate and minimize work and I thought it could be helpful to share these ideas and allow others to contribute their thoughts on best practices for co-maintainership:

  1. Use the Issue Queue: nearly all changes go through the issue queue and are committed using meaningful commit messages

  2. Decide which branches are to be used for what purposes. 4.7.x is unsupported - nothing goes there. 5.x-1.x is basically done as well unless there were a critical bug. 5.x-2.x and 6.x-1.x are still actively supported and are basically the same set of code so any commit to one should be immediately ported/committed to the other to help keep them in sync. New features that are more experimental will go into 6.x-2.x at this point.

  3. "Shard" the issues into areas of expertise. Freso has more experience with i18n and i12n so he takes all of those issues. Mike and I both try to grab everything else. I try to at least respond on every issue in the queue. The benefit of this is that the co-maintainers stop worrying about some parts of the project. The goal of co-maintainers, after all, is to help reduce the workload and splitting the work is a big part of that. Coordinating that split will make it even smoother.

  4. Agree on a Roadmap For Pathauto this is largely contained in the issue queue and the scope of the module is pretty well defined at this point. The only roadmap is to make it "smaller, faster, bugfree." But if the project is less clear on what could happen in the future then it's good to make sure you all agree before starting work.

  5. Get some non "maintainer" maintainers: mlsamuelson and VeryMisunderstood are both helpful in the issue queue answering questions or teasing out the exact problems from vague pleas for help. This is enormously helpful.

  6. Keep communicating Going on vacation? Have a big project that will slow you down for a while? Let the other folks know so that they can cover areas you may usually handle.

Paths

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