Misc #21922: Permissions for committers for default/bundled/unbundled gems repositories

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -

[Eregon (Benoit Daloze)]

I noticed recently that the team ruby-committers on GitHub no longer has write access to at least:

• https://github.com/ruby/benchmark
• https://github.com/ruby/cmath
• https://github.com/ruby/curses
• https://github.com/ruby/dbm
• https://github.com/ruby/e2mmap
• https://github.com/ruby/gdbm
• https://github.com/ruby/getoptlong
• https://github.com/ruby/iconv
• https://github.com/ruby/mathn
• https://github.com/ruby/mutex_m
• https://github.com/ruby/net-ftp
• https://github.com/ruby/net-pop
• https://github.com/ruby/net-telnet
• https://github.com/ruby/observer
• https://github.com/ruby/pathname (marked as maintained by @akr (Akira Tanaka) but they don't reply on GitHub, there is also an unclear relation with core Pathname which still hasn't been resolved and is causing warnings for months)
• https://github.com/ruby/prime
• https://github.com/ruby/pstore
• https://github.com/ruby/readline
• https://github.com/ruby/readline-ext
• https://github.com/ruby/ruby2_keywords
• https://github.com/ruby/scanf
• https://github.com/ruby/sdbm
• https://github.com/ruby/set
• https://github.com/ruby/shell
• https://github.com/ruby/syck
• https://github.com/ruby/sync
• https://github.com/ruby/thwait
• https://github.com/ruby/tk
• https://github.com/ruby/tracer
• https://github.com/ruby/webrick
• https://github.com/ruby/win32api
• https://github.com/ruby/xmlrpc

This list is from a couple cases I noticed myself + all repos - those committers have access - repos with known maintainers).
I filtered manually so there could be some mistake(s), though I tried to check carefully.

I am certain CRuby committers had access to some of these repositories (e.g. I merged PRs there), but not sure about all, some might already not have had write access for CRuby committers.

It seems only the 4 owners of the Ruby GitHub organization have write access to these repositories.

What motivated these changes?

I believe it is valuable that all CRuby committers can merge to default/bundled/unbundled gems repositories without active maintainers, as it was before.
There is this list to define maintainers, though it's a little bit outdated and inaccurate. It's fine enough for this issue though.
(A better definition IMO for active maintainers would be maintainers would actually respond to PRs and issues on GitHub to these repositories otherwise they are effectively not maintaining that repository, at least from an external perspective.)

IOW it seems unreasonable to always have to ask one of the 4 owners of the Ruby GitHub organization to merge a PR to such repositories, as it would be a significant overhead for committers and for owners, and it would delay merging PRs significantly.

I'm thinking for example to

• documentation PRs (many for pathname), which really shouldn't need an owner to merge
• PRs to improve/fix the CI (example)
• PRs fixing compatibility with recent changes in ruby's master branch
• etc.

Yet another way to see this is many default/bundled/unbundled gems do not have active maintainers. AFAIK so far in such cases then all CRuby committers could help, but this seems no longer the case.

(FWIW I saw there a default-gems-contributor team with 3 people, which explains why they can merge PRs to some repositories that ruby committers can't for example.)