Docs committer @jhodgdon stepped down as documentation coordinator awhile back, so language in the governance policy about the documentation committer is no longer accurate.

If we want to add a docs committer again in the future, we can revert this, but for now I think it's best to remove references to avoid confusion.

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docs-committer-no-more.patch3.62 KBxjm
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xjm created an issue. See original summary.

jhodgdon’s picture

Status: Needs review » Reviewed & tested by the community

It got to be pretty difficult for me to commit anything towards the end of my tenure as Documentation Maintainer. There were always deadlines, restrictions, etc., plus I didn't have my finger on the pulse of the Core project, so I was always afraid of committing something that would break someone else's more important patch. Even if I became a Core Documentation maintainer again sometime in the future, I would not ask for committ access again, and I would not recommend that Dries grant committer access to a Docs maintainer in the future. It worked out well for a while, but less so as time went on.

Also, the reason I was originally added as a committer was to break a bottleneck and take some of the load off the other Core committers. I occasionally even was called upon to do emergency commits, if no one else was available, and was happy to do that (even though it was scary!)... Now that there are so many committers, this is really a non-issue (or at least it was at the end of my tenure; no idea how things are now but it seems likely it's still a non-issue).

So, as former Docs committer, I support this patch.

Plus, I reviewed the editing and it reads well.

xjm’s picture

Thanks @jhodgdon for the extra context! All that makes sense to me as well. It's definitely a lot to put on a topic maintainer nowadays versus before release.

We've also gotten better at having two-way feedback with between committers and topic/subsystem maintainers, which helps. Plus, automating coding standards checking is gradually getting us closer to documentation patches that can just focus on improving technical communication, rather than also getting bogged down in formatting and mentoring problems in the process. Finally, I think we've had a gradual culture shift where more contributors realize that documentation actually matters (thanks in no small part to @jhodgdon's leadership over the years).

We have had some bottlenecks recently in the RTBC queue where many patches (including a number of documentation improvements) went without replies for a few weeks, but this was more due to the convergence of a sprint, a commit freeze, and reduced committer availability. However, the documentation patches got unblocked comparatively quickly, and the delay for them was just more a side effect of having a lot of tough issues outstanding at the same time. So despite the RTBC queue problems in the past month, I agree overall with @jhodgdon's suggestion that we have better ways to solve bottleneck issues in the future than asking a topic coordinator to also act as a committer.

Dries’s picture

I'm +1 on this patch and removing some of the language.

Let's complete #3327844: Convert governance docs to markdown, redirect d.o page to Gitlab UI as canonical version before committing this.

Thank you, @jhodgdon.

Gábor Hojtsy’s picture

  • c7e53304 committed on main
    Issue #2853716 by xjm, jhodgdon, Dries, Gábor Hojtsy: Remove language...
Gábor Hojtsy’s picture

Status: Reviewed & tested by the community » Fixed

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.