Offering to co-maintain Real-time SEO for Drupal

The present owner and two of the maintainers are still around. We need to hear their opinion about this. I've sent a PM to all three asking them to comment here.

Postponing for now. Please set back to “Active” if there is no response from anyone in 14 days.

I contacted also Kimiez, since Kimiez can add new co-maintainers/maintainers and logged in in the last 12 months.

Hello,

Thanks for the message. We're discussing internally what the best way to move forward here is.

~ Alexander

It's currently impossible to install the module on Drupal 9, the last patch for that has been waiting for a merge since July.
#3119603: Drupal 9 readiness

It is blocking lots of people to use the module since you have to make a fork if you want to use it. I hope it get resolved soon.
Thanks for your help.

No answer from any of the project's maintainers in 14 days (Kingdutch, answered - sort of - but he is only a co-maintainer).

Patch to make project compatible with Drupal 9 exists, but has not been merged. I think enough time has elapsed for internal discussions and I am moving this forward. mandclu has been added as a maintainer.

I have been the primary maintainer of this module for the past three years. So I take some offense in being labeled only a co-maintainer. This has also been the view from Open Social’s standpoint as organisation.

We now realise that my role in the project may not be marked properly (I have all the permissions I need to do my work, so this is not something we’ve ever considered). As Open Social employee (you can find my picture on that page), I am allowed to speak on behalf of Open Social for this module.

This also explains why I had not received any communication before or about this issue (until Kimmiez asked me to reply here after she received her PM). The Open Social account is an account that is used for project ownership and for security reasons is not easily (or regularly) accessible.

Jaap Jan has left our company quite some time ago, which is probably why he won’t respond. I’ll ask he be removed from the maintainer list.

We’ve since (two weeks before your comment) merged all open RTBC issues and ensured Drupal 9 compatibility (the Drupal 9 issue for 1.x has been re-opened since and closed today due to a bug that was missed in the initial fix/review).

We’d prefer seeing someone active in the issue queue before taking them on board as (co-)maintainer. My quick searches (using “followed by” or “submitted by”) did not reveal such activity for mandclu. Additionally module maintenance and improvement requires more than is available on Drupal.org as external JavaScript is required that can not be hosted on Drupal.org due to licensing.

We’re committing to making sure we review the issue queue on a bi-weekly basis going forward to ensure community submitted issues are merged. If any more urgent work is needed, I am easily reachable on the Drupal.org Slack under the same nickname (as are most of my colleagues).

The users who are contacted in these cases are the project maintainer, the maintainers (users who have all the permissions on the project), and any co-maintainer (users who don't have all the permissions on the project) who can add new co-maintainers/maintainers. I apologize if we forgot to contact somebody.

For what I recall, at the time we contacted users, we contacted all the users who should be contacted.

I have been the primary maintainer of this module for the past three years. So I take some offense in being labeled only a co-maintainer. This has also been the view from Open Social’s standpoint as organisation.

No offence was intended.

The term "co-maintainer" is a technical term that is defined on this page: https://www.drupal.org/node/251466

I checked the permissions carefully before contacting the maintainers, and at the time, you did not have the permission to add new maintainers or co-maintainers to the project. I.e. you were not in a position to resolve this co-maintaining offer. The procedure for handling these requests only requires the webmaster to contact and wait for a response from the owner in these cases. Contacting other maintainers is not required, but is a matter of courtesy at the discretion of the webmaster. It is OK to have a a corporate account as project owner, but if that is done, you should make sure that the email-address associated with the account is monitored, as it will be used for important communication about your project.

The webmaster expects co-maintainer requests to be resolved by the project's owner or one of the project's maintainers (i.e. a person that has the permission to add a co-maintainer). The time line we use assumes that requests are resolved 14 days after the owner and maintainers have been contacted. By "resolving" I mean that either the person offering to co-maintain is added as co-maintainer, or that a definitive statement declining the offer is posted in response to the offer.

Your answer in comment #6 did not resolve the matter. It is bad for the Drupal ecosystem that our projects are not well maintained (in this case a patch for Drupal 9 existed when the issue was brought to the attention of the webmasters on Sep 28, but it was not committed until October 6). In such cases it is standard procedure for the webmasters to intervene and resolve the matter in the absence of any definitive action to resolve it from the project's owner or his/her appointed deputies.

We’re committing to making sure we review the issue queue on a bi-weekly basis going forward to ensure community submitted issues are merged.

The patch required by Drupal 9 became RTBC on April 24 2020. There was no review of it from any Open Social employee until Oct 6 2020. That indicates that a bi-weekly review is not done.

Thanks for the clear explanation Gisle, those are some things I haven't encountered in my time here on Drupal.org.

We've now fixed the permissions so that I'm clearly marked as maintainer. I will also raise the point internally that we're missing important communication through the corporate account and need to rectify that.

> @KIngdutch if you feel it's more appropriate to remove me as a co-maintainer, I will gladly defer to your judgement,

We have decided to remove you for the time being. I will update the project page and the open roadmap issue in the coming 14 days to indicate what the 2.0 stable release has been stuck on.

I will also open an issue in the issue queue to propose dropping support for the Drupal 7 version as we haven't had any Drupal 7 projects internally for some time and the changes made for the 2.0 version are difficult to backport to Drupal 7 (hence the lack of release since 2017). Being able to close all the open 7.x-1.x issues that won't get fixed will also help in clearing up the issue queue.

We welcome your feedback in those issues. If there's anything you would like to discuss in real-time or have any urgent matters about the Real-Time SEO module, please don't hesitate to contact me through the Drupal Slack. We strive to make sure an issue such as this one is not needed in the future.

I will also open an issue in the issue queue to propose dropping support for the Drupal 7 version as we haven't had any Drupal 7 projects internally for some time and the changes made for the 2.0 version are difficult to backport to Drupal 7 (hence the lack of release since 2017).

The Drupal 7 branch of the project still has more than 7000 installations. Drupal 7 does not reach EOL until November 2022.

Dropping support for the Drupal 7 branch of the project before November 2022 will be bad for our ecosystem. May I suggest some alternatives:

1. Add an external maintainer to the project to maintain the Drupal 7 branch only. You can do it here (Component "Needs maintainer"). I have done that with some projects to keep the branch I am not interested in myself (because I have no clients using the branch) maintained. I've never had any bad experiences (such as these external maintainers interfering with the branch my company is in charge of) when doing this.
2. If you don't want the Drupal 7 branch associated with Open Social after you've dropped support, fork the Drupal 7 branch into a separate project, and ask the webmasters to assign ownership to "Unsupported projects". That way, it will no longer be associated Open Social, and will automatically be available for adoption by anyone who wants to keep on maintaining it.

Thanks for the suggestions Gisle! That's why I wanted to open up an issue rather than do it outright. I will include your suggestions in the discussion.