Looking for co-maintainers

[konsoletyper]

As you already know, most of the work on TeaVM I do personally. I really don't like reviewing PRs, and there are reasons for that. Reviewing a PRs takes a tremendous amount of time. Usually, writing some functionality from scratch myself is much less time consuming rather than reviewing PR. It could be a good time investment into community and potential future co-maintainers, but the thing is that it's hard to distinguish persons who really want to become a co-maintainer and contribute to TeaVM regularly and persons who make casual PR and disappear.

Another thing to mention is that I believe every project needs some direction to move to, especially projects with limited resources like TeaVM. For every release I have some functionality that I want to present to the users, but reviewing PRs just distract me from that goal.

But I also understand that having a project like this that depends solely on one person is a way to nowhere. I always wanted to develop a community around it, including community of maintainers. Now I think I'm ready to test something new. Instead of accepting some random casual PRs (which I would in most cases ignore, unless it's clear small bugfixes or improvements), I'd like to get some co-maintainers who would improve TeaVM on regular basis. This should not be necessarily much in terms time or functionality, but what important is working regularly and long-term. From my side I would invest my time in assisting co-maintainers in understanding internals of TeaVM, I'd be ready to answer your questions ASAP.

I think this process should be gradual. First, I just take a "junior" co-maintainer, who sends me PR and with whom we discuss what to do next and how to do it. Then, if everything works well, I grant access to the repository, and so on.

Why would you be interested in this? Well, I know there's not a big community around TeaVM, and many of you already have a hobby-project. But who knows, may be you think that having TeaVM would make more fun. Also, it's a great opportunity to improve your skill, to get a lot of experience. As for me, many years ago I was hired by JetBrains thanks to TeaVM. And yes, I still hope that TeaVM could receive more attention and more money. As for now, it brings slightly more than 300 EUR pro month, which is not that great, but it's still something.

Let me know if you interested and we can discuss our further steps.

[mechite]

Hi,

I am happy to talk with you and be available to call with you or talk to you and
could help you on a regular basis on reviewing PRs for you, gaining your trust on
my ability to reason between them and understanding TeaVM better, and making
my own contributions to TeaVM in the future.

Having taking a look at PRs that get submitted to TeaVM, I feel like the main issues
you really face (which are probably the cause of reviews taking a long time):

• People taking code from OpenJDK, and having to actually check for certain that this
  is not the case

  I also think adding some kind of DCO, where people need to git commit -s to add
  the Signed-off-by footer to their commits, and whereby the DCO document in our
  repository can make clear that:

  • Contributors agree they did not take code from OpenJDK or any other
    license-incompatible projects / repositories
  • Contributors are held liable if any issues occur from stealing code from OpenJDK
    that they did, rather than the person reviewing/merging those changes in

  but I (and probably anyone else who is happy to help you with maintenance) am (are)
  still absolutely happy to help with guaranteeing that people are not doing this, and
  reviewing against OpenJDK + e.g. Grep by Vercel to assert "to our best knowledge"
  that nothing originates from other repositories

• People not writing test cases for their code, their intent and knowledge about how it
  functions being uncertain, it causes you to not know whether this code will actually
  function, and then in many cases you can come to conclusions that it actually won't.

I believe at least having a set of trusted people who can ensure changes are made in a
manner that encourages maturity; test cases; clear intent; a real use case for the changes
— that is enough to at least take the burden of yourself, the person who sets the direction
for the project.

I grant access to the repository

If it was me, I would suggest holding off a while on this.

Just having people review PRs, a list of people who you can trust reviews from, should be
enough to make it not time-consuming at all to review them? At some point, maybe, but
take care with it.

[konsoletyper]

and could help you on a regular basis on reviewing PRs for you

Don't get me wrong. I don't need an assistant to review PRs for me. I think it's just ok to ignore most PRs, unless they come from proven community members. Instead, I'd like to grow this trusted community members.

Having taking a look at PRs that get submitted to TeaVM, I feel like the main issues
you really face

No-no-no, there are plenty of ways to make a bad PR and there are plenty of reasons that make reviewing PR exhausting, and moreover, futile.

that is enough to at least take the burden of yourself

It's not just taking the burden from myself. It's just taking burden from all co-maintainers by not reviewing PR that aren't worth reviewing.

[mechite]

As long as we never ignore issues, I can still stand with this point

[konsoletyper]

@mechite so I still don't understand your point. Do you want to become a maintainer, focusing on producing PR and working on actual features, without reviewing external PRs?

As long as we never ignore issues, I can still stand with this point

A maintainer has to ignore issue. First, there are some issue that make no sense. Second, there are issues that don't provide much business value or can be trivially worked around, but their fix requires huge amount of time. In the second case it's technically not "ignoring", but "we'll implement it later", which may be 10 years later.

[mechite]

Do you want to become a maintainer, focusing on producing PR

I don't want to waste your time - I don't have the time to work on features which are not
specifically helping with my own personal/business use cases. TeaVM already seems to fit
very well with my needs, so the only thing you can expect from me are bug fixes if required.

[mohitsatr]

I’d like to express my interest in contributing to TeaVM. I’m really interested in compilers, VMs, and WebAssembly and I think this project could be a good starting point to explore my interests further. When I came across this project, I found it really amazing, but I was a bit hesitant to get involved due to the lack of community activity and the number of stale PRs, but it seems like now is a good time to get involved.

I contribute to Checkstyle, so I have experience with static analysis, and a little background in writing language grammars.

This should not be necessarily much in terms time or functionality, but what important is working regularly and long-term

Right now, I have a lot going on in my life until April (I’ll be graduating then), so I may not be able to contribute much, but I can still try to dedicate around 1-2 hours per week. Once things settle down, I’ll be able to contribute more actively. I understand that you don't want to invest your energy into someone who might disappear after a couple of PRs so you can hold your decision on me till I'm fully involved. In the meantime, can you suggest a good starting point for getting involved?

Looking forward to contributing and growing TeaVM.

[konsoletyper]

@mohitsatr can you please join Discord server, if you still haven't?

[mohitsatr]

I have sent the request to join.