How to maintain this collection

[Andersson007]

SUMMARY

This is an essence of the Collection Maintainer guidelines.

• First of all, subscribe to this repo (the Watch button in the upper-right corner).

• Review issues / pull requests:

  • Use the Collection Review Checklist.
  • If you're not a specialist in an area, review general stuff like doc correctness, for example.
  • Everything necessary is in place, for example, a changelog fragment.
  • No breaking changes are going to be introduced (at least unplanned, without proper preparations like announcements, deprecation, etc.).
  • Find and mention past contributors (look who contributed to a module/plugin including when the content lived in ansible/ansible.
  • Conduct pr-review days from time to time, i.e. to go through all open PRs asking folks if there are any obstacles, closing abandoned ones, etc.

• Merge approved things (if any questions, ask on Matrix in the #community:ansible.im channel):

  • Backport them using the backport-* labels.
    • All things (except major_changes) from main to the current release branch (the latest stable-* branch).
    • Bugfixes to other supported branches.

• Release (examine the Release guidelines:

  • When there's something to release. See changelog fragments / merged PRs in main since the last release in the current release branch - the highest stable-* branch.
  • Use the Release guidelines to conduct releases. There are step-by-step guides.

• Look after CI:

  • Subscribe to the news-for-maintainers repo and keep things updated according to the announcements.

• Try to find new maintainers for the whole collection, group of modules and individual modules. Always ask folks (after merging their PRs) for permission to add them in .github/BOTMETA.yml. As an example, see the comment.

• It makes sense to take a look at the community-topics repo from time to time. There can be related topic, for example, Community collections: when to drop support for Ansible 2.9 and ansible-base 2.10? ansible-community/community-topics#50.

• Regularly read the Collection Maintainer guidelines.

• If you need advice, ask in on Matrix in the #community:ansible.im channel).

[Andersson007]

bot_skip

[Andersson007]

cc @Ompragash

[felixfontein]

I would also suggest to change devel to the latest stable-2.y branch in CI for all but the latest stable-x branch in this repository once a new stable-2.y branch is created in ansible/ansible (same as I did in #413). That will keep maintenance of the non-latest stable branches a lot easier since you no longer have to make newer ansible-core releases happy.

[Andersson007]

by @felixfontein (and thanks for the comment!)

not sure who is 'maintaining' community.network, but I think #416 #417 #418 should be merged and new 1.x, 2.x and 3.x releases should be made ASAP so that all announcements actually go out
also issue #81 needs to be updated
maybe it's also better to switch to an easier branching model for community.network, considering that it is very inactive compared to community.general. maybe instead of creating stable-4 soon for the 4.0.0 release we should start releasing the current major version from main (as in c.crypto, c.docker, c.mysql, ...)?

cc @Ompragash ^