Gaps in maintenance coverage (Language Summit follow up)

[ezio-melotti]

@pf_moore

One problem with CODEOWNERS is that it has an implication of “ownership” (the clue’s in the name )

You are right – I suggested this because it was easily parsable, but it is probably not be the best option.

In another post I brought up the fact that we already have several lists of devs:

• a machine-parsable list in the voters repo (private)
• a machine-generated (from the list above) developers.csv (in the devguide repo)
• a machine-generated (from the csv above) developer log (in the devguide)
• a separately-maintained list of experts (in the devguide repo)
• a machine-generated (from the list of experts above) nosy-list autocomplete on bpo (no longer used)
• a separately-maintained translators list (in the devguide)
• a separately-maintained CODEOWNERS file (in the cpython repo)
• possibly others (e.g. release managers), more or less related to list of core devs

Ideally we would only have one (or two) human-friendly and machine-parsable lists that are used to generate the expert index, the developer log, CODEOWNERS, the list of translators, and possibly GitHub teams or whatever other notification mechanism we come up with to notify developers.

@pf_moore

What would be useful IMO is a list of people who have knowledge on a subject - people you can ping for an informed opinion, without an implication that they will take responsibility for the issue.

This is what the nosy-autocomplete did, but there is no direct equivalent on GitHub that works out of the box.

Edit: I created Machine-parsable developers list · Issue #848 · python/devguide · GitHub