initial draft of project charter; closes #4087

[boneskull]

This is a draft charter. It's important all maintainers give their OK on this. In addition, I think it needs to be ratified by the CPC (which I'll deal with). But before that happens, we need to make sure it's ok.

Open to any suggestions and can hopefully answer any questions we have. See #4087 for issue.

cc @jorydotcom

I've added the four other active maintainers to the list of reviewers, but anyone from @mocha/core (or anyone from the community, even) is welcome to offer feedback.

[boneskull]

We might want to take this opportunity to split MAINTAINERS.md into multiple files (for example, pulling out part of it into a new GOVERNANCE.md)

[juergba]

Meanwhile I regret having agreed to putting Mocha into the "Growth" box. It's not what I'm experiencing, I feel Mocha has passed its climax and is living of its shiny past.

Mocha will strive to evolve with the needs of the community, but will make every effort not to abandon its current users in doing so.

This statement is the opposite of growth. We are looking backwards into the past, eagerly trying not to hurt anybody. We are favouring the past against the future. We haven't taken any larger decision since several months, the best way to keep the past alive.

I'm not really taking this paper seriously, because it will not have any impact in my daily life as a maintainer, but at least above sentence should be twisted:
"Mocha will make every effort to evolve with the needs of the community, but will strive not to abandon its current users in doing so."

[boneskull]

We can change the wording there, though it doesn’t seem to be materially different (to me).

It hasn’t seen much action in the past six months because, frankly, I’ve been busy with other things and haven’t had the time to put in. It does not mean the project is dying. The biggest flurry of activity on this project happened when TJ wrote it. If you look at my contributions over the years, you’ll see that my activity comes and goes with significant breaks... yet here we are.

“Growth” means that we intend to work towards a more mature model of project governance and sustainability. It does not mean we necessarily intend to add a bunch of new features. To that end, I think it’s appropriate for where we’re at.

Mocha has a demonstrated impact in the ecosystem. A lot of people and dev teams and companies rely on Mocha. More projects depend on Mocha every month. As a line graph over time, it’d point up and to the right.

Insofar as “past it’s prime,” no, nobody gets excited by Mocha. That’s where we’re at. Every project plateaus in this way.

No, this document won’t really have much of an effect on any of us in terms of technical leadership. It’s not really for us—it’s for the Foundation. Still, it’s helpful to be able to point to this and say why we’re not willing to e.g. ship built-in assertions.

Either way we all need to be comfortable with what this document is saying. I’m happy to have a discussion about the Foundation or project future in another issue (admin repo), Gitter, or otherwise.

[craigtaub]

LGTM 👍

Im fine with the sentence, given as a mission statement its somewhat ambitious and ambiguous anyway.

Means we intent to work towards a more mature model of project governance and sustainability

Sounds great. I think we need a conversation about what that actually looks like (just LTS?). At this point im not sure.

[boneskull]

I think we need a conversation about what that actually looks like (just LTS?)

Right, that's one part, but we also need to formalize a few things around governance.

[boneskull]

@mochajs/core Please review or approve this; I've seen some comments, but I'd like explicit approvals

[boneskull]

We may need to change it further since it must go through the CPC, but I'll get that process started.

[boneskull]

Ref: openjs-foundation/cross-project-council#419