author: Erik Tollerud
date-created: 2018 February 22
date-last-revised: 2018 May 14
type: Process
status: Accepted
A revision of the concept of Astropy-affiliated packages (hereafter "affiliated packages") is proposed. The idea of affiliated packages has continued mostly unaltered since the original vision for Astropy. However, time has revealed some potential improvements in how the ecosystem is structured and the review process for affiliated packages. Hence, this APE proposes to make three changes:
- This APE creates the concept of "coordinated" packages - affiliated-like packages that are more closely overseen by the Astropy Project. While apparently significant, this change is mainly a recognition of de facto status that some affiliated packages already have.
- The APE changes the review process to a more explicit criteria-based review process - again, this is primarily simply formalizing a process that was already in place in the coordination committee.
- It lays out guidelines for the eventual goal of converting the affiliated package review process into a more "peer-review" style, where other members of the community can contribute to the review.
From its inception, Astropy has included an ecosystem of astronomy packages beyond the astropy core package (see the original vision). The process by which these "affiliated" packages are reviewed and accepted has already changed a few times since the project's inception as the ecosystem has grown. However, the current state has several significant limitations.
First, the affiliated packages include a mix of two different kinds of packages. Some packages have been developed as a fairly integrated effort alongside the core package. That is, feature planning took into account that these affiliated packages existed, and that important features would be implemented in them (e.g.,photutils, astroquery, and specutils). Thus, the continued existence of those packages is understood to be important for the Astropy project as a whole. Other affiliated packages (the majority) are developed more independently of the core package, which treat Astropy mainly as a base to build on, do not as strongly influence planning for the core package, and provide functionality that is not general enough to be considered part of the core requirements. It has proved difficult to design a development and review process that works effectively with both of these classes of packages.
Second, the current review process has become somewhat opaque and rather awkward to keep organized. The coordination committee reviews the packages, which in practice nearly always receive a "provisional" designation, but then must be re-reviewed as a whole at some future date to become full affiliated packages. This provisional and full distinction is opaque and probably meaningless to the average user who just wants to know what a package does, and if it is any good. Additionally, while the review standards are stated on the affiliated package web page, some are subjective, allowing at least the possibility of biased or exclusionary behavior to sneak in with little recourse given the blunt nature of reject, provisional, and accept.
Third, the coordination committee has found it difficult to keep up with the rate of affiliated package review (and re-review) requests. Many reviews languish for months before receiving even a provisional response, which can be disheartening and perceived by some as unwelcoming. This is primarily driven by the need to do a detailed and sometimes lengthy review of each package, even if that amounts to just following a checklist (see the section on the new review process for more details of the current process in practice).
These issues were discussed at length by the coordination committee, and later at the 2017 Astropy coordination meeting. The new structure and processes described below were a product of a breakout session at the coordination meeting. This APE is thus an effort to formalize the ideas and describe how to implement them.
The biggest-picture change is to split the currently single-category affiliated package ecosystem into two categories: "Astropy coordinated" and "Astropy affiliated" packages. This change is not as drastic as it sounds because it reflects the reality of the current situation. As outlined above, two such categories effectively exist already, and this APE simply formalizes this status.
In practice, packages that remain as affiliated packages are essentially unaffected by this change. They continue to be managed/organized outside of the Astropy project core team and retain complete control of the repositories, code base, etc. By contrast, packages in the new "coordinated package" category will be treated as a core component of the Astropy project, with the project (via the coordinating committee) overseeing who is maintaining the package and taking responsibility for continued maintenance in the event the original author(s) no longer can do so. This means maintainer roles will be created for all the coordinated packages, and have status as astropy roles.
This also means the development process for coordinated packages will generally track close to the core package model - e.g. they will usually follow the same package layout as the core package, APEs can be used for major decisions/standards, etc. Note that there is not a requirement that coordinated packages follow the release calendar for the core package (although they may do so if desired), as a more flexible release calendar is one of the major advantages to having a coordinated package not be in the core.
One additional consequence of this change is that coordinated packages will live in the astropy GitHub organization , for which the project has management power, while affiliated packages, in general, should not. To ease this process, however, any affiliated packages currently in the astropy organization can be "legacied-in". This means that they may remain in the GitHub organization even if they are not coordinated packages. Moving forward, though, new coordinated packages should be in the astropy organization and new affiliated packages should not be.
Note, though, that affiliated packages are still considered a part of the "Astropy Project". That umbrella term applies to both coordinated and affiliated packages, as well as the overall community.
This APE also proposes a second change to the review process, motivated by the concerns in the "Motivation" section above about the committee's review process. To counter these concerns, prior to this APE the coordination committee has informally adopted a checklist-based approach, checking if certain bullet points are met. While the formal criteria are listed in relatively vague terms on the affiliated package web site, the details of how those criteria are met have been fairly consistent using an unwritten but roughly standard list. In practice, in the past this has meant that affiliated packages are given "provisional" status if some of these items are met (a status that will no longer exist if this APE is accepted), or "full" if a larger set of them are.
This de facto checklist implies that a more transparent and understandable policy would be to make this checklist formal and completely public, and use it directly as the formal review criteria - i.e., a rubric. These criteria will be laid out explicitly in a document (which has already been drafted - see the "Implementation" section below), with various levels defined for each criteria, generally corresponding to "good", "acceptable", and "unacceptable". This will make the review process much faster and (eventually) open the review process beyond the coordination committee, thereby addressing the concerns from the "Motivation" section.
On a longer term horizon, a criteria-based review checklist will allow the review process to change to a more peer-review model. That is, instead of every package being vetted by the coordination committee, the committee can act more as editors, sometimes offering the review opportunity to other members of the Astropy community. The details of this process will not be set in stone by this APE, as they should be flexible enough to accomodate the experiences of the first rounds of reviewers. But this APE sets some initial steps (see "Implementation" below) and makes the general idea the eventual goal for the affiliated package review process.
N/A
The changes outlined in this APE will be implemented as three distinct efforts:
- The new package review criteria have already been implemented by the coordination committee and reviewed by the community (Available in Google doc form here. These criteria will need to be translated to a structured format to be shown on the affiliated package instructions section of the Astropy website. The affiliated package listing page will also need to be updated for these new criteria - a concept for this new site is viewable here.
- The Astropy web site (and to a lesser extent, affiliated package-related docs) will need to be updated to reflect the existence of the coordinated packages. Additionally, the roles web site will need to be populated with the new roles for the coordinated packages (and the role descriptions). This requires relatively little effort and can be completed by the Astropy web site maintainers upon acceptance of this APE.
- A "peer-review" process will need to be set up to enable reviews by community members beyond the coordination committee. Such processes exist in other code contexts (e.g. the Journal of Open Source Software and Ropensci) that may have tools that can be re-used to make the process smooth and efficient. Setting such tools up is likely to take some time, however, and needs to be adaptable enough to respond to the first few reviews. Hence this APE does not describe the details of this implementation - that is explicitly left to be developed by the Astropy community with the cooordination committee acting as "editors". However, this APE gives a suggested starting point: reviewers can be selected by the coordination committee from the pool of existing affiliated package authors or Astropy core team members. They receive a prompt to review a new package via email (along with the criteria described a above), and provide their reviews in the most straightforward manner feasible (email, a GitHub issue for the review, or similar). The coordination committee then performs the current process of posting the result of the review as issues in the affiliated package's repository for discussion. In the future some of these processes will likely be automated, but this simplest viable start point will provide a place to start.
While in the future this APE proposes that new affiliated packages not be in the Astropy GitHub organization, affiliated packages from before this APE that are in the Astropy organization will be left there unless specifically requested otherwise.
The main alternative is status quo. This does not address the concerns raised in the "motivation" section, but requires no additional effort. Other possibilities include any subset of the three changes outlined above.
The concept of this APE was discussed extensively by the Astropy Coordination Committee and approved. The APE text was discussed and accepted by multiple community stakeholders who have experience and project-level interest in affiliated packages. The APE was accepted on May 14, 2018.