Hello,
during the Kamailio Development Meeting that took place in Dusseldorf
earlier this month, one topic was related to administrative tasks
related to project development and management, how to
simplify/automatize such tasks.
To reduce the work load on volunteering contributors, GitHub Actions
were already used for various tasks related to project development and
management (e.g., automatic builds on commits and pull requests to
detect compile errors or code formatting mistakes).
In Dusseldorf another task was configured to be managed with GitHub
Actions, respectively the check of open issues and pull requests to
evaluate the interest of submitters, developers and community users to
pursue them. If there is no activity on an issue (potential bug or
feature request) or a pull request, after 6 weeks it is marked with the
label `stale`. After two more weeks of no activity, the issue or the
pull request is marked with the label `expired` and closed. Note that
any comment postpones the expire timeline, being considered that there
is interest in pursuing the issue or the pull request.
Requests for features were already treated in this way: if nobody
commits to implement it, it can be closed after one month, but it needed
manual work and many were still kept open. Potential bug reports that
become very old are hard to tackle if the source code changes or new
major releases are out, they might even not be valid anymore.
Anyhow, this automatic operations can be reverted if there is still
interest in pursuing the specific issues or pull requests. A registered
developer can remove labels and reopen a closed issue or pull request.
The non-registered-developer contributors have to make a comment that
includes the token `/notstale` to remove the label `stale` or includes
the token `/notexpired` to reopen a closed item.
This new kind of automatic task management might add a little
inconvenience because one has to restate the interest from time to time
for those items that could not be addressed. However, considering that
Kamailio is an open source collaborative project, in order to be fair
for those that volunteer to spend time and resources for development of
Kamailio, also the users/submitters have to stay engaged, not just
report and forget about.
The process to automatize tasks related to Kamailio development and
administration is work in progress. Everything can be adjusted based on
feedback (e.g., time lines), feel free to suggest improvements or new
solutions to make things easier for everyone within the project ecosystem.
Cheers,
Daniel
--
Daniel-Constantin Mierla (@
asipto.com)
twitter.com/miconda --
linkedin.com/in/miconda
Kamailio Consultancy and Development Services
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