Maintainer needed

[enkessler]

It has been a fun year and a half since I took over maintaining childprocess, but I can no longer really give it the care and attention that such a useful and relied upon project deserves. If anyone is interested in taking over stewardship of childprocess, please let me know.

For awareness: @jarib @dg-ratiodata @mattwynne

[ghost]

Hello is a new maintainer still needed ? I will take a look at the code tomorrow

[enkessler]

Yep! Let me know if you have any questions about the project.

[ghost]

I will take the time to evaluate what is needed and experiment a little. Expect a reply by the end of the week or something. Anything I should know about the code base ? Any advice will do.

[enkessler]

Nothing special comes to mind. The project has multi-platform CI and handy Rake tasks, so it's reasonably developer friendly.

I honestly haven't done a whole lot since I took over because it was already in more or less 'maintenance mode' even back then. I've been more than happy to double check and safely merge in fixes from outside contributions but there are still some outstanding issues that no one has tackled yet. Feel free to investigate one as a way of becoming familiar with the code base.

[enkessler]

@TanguyAndreani How goes the code delve?

[ghost]

Oh I forgot to keep you up to date. I have been away for a few days due to personal reasons. Right now I don’t think I’ll have the time to maintain it because I’m working on various side projects of mine. I’ll be working on various issues of childprocess for a few weeks and then I’ll submit a definitive answer here sorry for making you wait.

[enkessler]

Fun fact: if you work on and fix some of the existing outstanding issues, you will already be just as much a maintainer as I am. ;)

[ghost]

Final answer: I’ll have enough free time from around December and it will likely last for a few years. If no one has taken over by then, I’ll be able to. I know you needed someone for as soon as possible please excuse me.

[sds]

@enkessler If you're still looking for a maintainer, I'm happy to volunteer.

For context, I maintain Overcommit, a large project which actually depends on the childprocess gem, so I'm interested in continuing to see it maintained. Overcommit supports both Windows and *nix, so we'd ensure to maintain support on those platforms.

My intention would be to keep the lights on with minimal effort, biasing towards community contributions with appropriate tests and demonstrated value to a broader audience. Looking at the pull request and issue history I'm not too concerned about the volume here.

Feel free to check out my profile for other projects I maintain. No worries if you have someone else in mind! I'm happy as long as someone is keeping the lights on.

[enkessler]

@sds I am still looking for a maintainer, yes!

Minimal effort is about where I am at now. The open issues are more or less of the "Yep, that's a neat idea. Am I going to have the confidence to do it myself and not screw up or are you going to help out? No? Then don't hold your breath." kind. If you want to take it on yourself that's fine. If you want to tag team with me on things, that is also fine.

[sds]

I aim to have 0 open pull requests which are blocked on the maintainer. Here's what I personally would do with the current open PRs:

• Support non-ASCII characters on Windows #130 - Would close. Looks to be superceded by Support non-ASCII characters on Windows #134
• Only require FFI on Windows #132 - Would merge as it looks reasonable. Decrease in coverage seems inconsequential
• Support non-ASCII characters on Windows #134 - Would rebase/repush to see if test failures were spurious. If they pass, would merge
• Support newer rspec-expectations #138 - Would ask author about the behavior change in tests, as the change seems like we're no longer as strict about the interface contract. If a good answer emerges, would merge; otherwise would close.

For open issues, I would close any from 2016 or earlier asking the requestor to reopen if it's still an issue affecting them and providing an up-to-date set of steps to reproduce. Anything later I would respond welcoming a pull request to fix the issue.

Just giving you an idea of my approach. Happy to manage all of the above once I have the necessary access.

[enkessler]

@sds I added you as a collaborator. Give it a spin. :)

[yaauie]

@enkessler @sds I am also willing to help shoulder the load. We use ChildProcess pretty extensively as a development dependency of elastic/logstash in integration tests and in several of its packaging tasks, primarily on POSIX-systems, but also on Windows.

I also recently opened #141 to add support for Java 9+ (including Java 11) since Java 8 is no longer receiving public updates.

[sds]

Hey @enkessler, how would you like to manage cutting new gem releases? Happy to help.

[enkessler]

Management-wise, there's not much to it.

• make sure that the build is green
• make sure that the changelog is updated
• make sure that the version is bumped appropriately (i.e. Semantic versioning)
• build the gem from the green master commit, push the built gem to RubyGems, and tag the commit in Git with a version tag

I'll have time this weekend to eyeball everything that's been going on and do a release.

[sds]

Process sounds straightforward—I do the same with other projects.

Updated the change log in 27f9f60 and opened #142 with the version bump, if it's useful.

[enkessler]

@yaauie Extra help is always appreciated. :)

@sds since you are going to be a maintainer, please add your email to the gemspec so that people can get in touch with you. I'll add you as an owner on RubyGems so that you can do releases. Once those things are done, I think that we can call you 'official' and close this issue. :)

[sds]

@enkessler Added in #145. Based on master for this situation since it's not a functional change—hope that's OK in this context.

[enkessler]

As long as you don't forget to merge master back down into dev afterwards so that the change is available in the primary 'working' branch, sure.

[sds]

Thanks for the reminder. I've run git merge master on the dev branch so that we're up-to-date on this front.

[enkessler]

@sds You're an owner on RubyGems now. You now have all the power that you need to be a full maintainer. :)