Re: [BuildStream] Contribution Guidelines, Status of nosoftware subgroup

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

Hi Chandan,

On Wed, 2020-04-08 at 23:34 +0100, Chandan Singh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was looking at our contributing guide to add some specifics on issue
> reporting, which is when I realized that our contributing docs
> (https://docs.buildstream.build/master/CONTRIBUTING.html#filing-issues)
> refer to a policy guide in a separate "nosoftware/alignment" repository
> (https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/nosoftware/alignment/-/blob/master/BuildStream_policies.md).
>
> I personally found this rather odd and I don't see why these instructions need
> to live in a separate repository. In fact, I was thinking about making this
> section more prominent, and move out of the Contributing section to the
> top-level index. But, that's a separate concern.
>
> The information in the nosoftware/alignment repository is certainly out of date
> now given that it hasn't been updated in over an year. In my opinion, we should
> some of this content to the main contributing guide, perhaps in a more condensed
> form. The current guide seems very process oriented and focuses too much on
> labels, assignees, statuses etc. I think we can simplify most of this since we
> should aim to keep the barrier to entry for contribution low. How do folks feel
> about this?

Definitely let's simplify this.

This all comes from a desire to manage progress on issues at a project
scope, which I think is a strange and burdened process for a FOSS
project.

My position on this remains that the process for using our issue
tracking and patch submission should be as simple and unburdened as
possible.

> This specific question aside, I am also curious about the nosoftware subgroup
> (https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/nosoftware) in general. Since none of the
> repositories there have been updated in quite a while, I wanted to ask if
> anyone is maintaining it currently?
>
> If so, I think we need to document what each repository is supposed to do. At
> present, they seem to have a weird combination of pdf reports, status updates,
> shell scripts and weirdly enough our beloved BuildStream Beaver.
>
> If not, we should probably move some of the content to the main repository or
> the website, and archive the rest.

+1 to retire the nosoftware subgroup in general.

We would want to move some things to the BuildStream repo and some
perhaps to the website.

I suggest when doing this we consider:

  * Is this content specific to a BuildStream release/version ?

    If so, it's useful to have this revisioned with BuildStream code,
    technical documentation and guides for instance can later be
    indexed by BuildStream version which is useful.

  * Is this content specific to the BuildStream repository ?

    If so, it's convenient to have this in the BuildStream repo, for
    the purpose of minimizing fragmentation.

  * Is this content general for any repositories under the governance
    of BuildStream ?

    If so, it's probably best to have this separate, in the website
    repo.

Does this make sense ?

Cheers,
    -Tristan