I wrote this package a long time ago, when I co-founded JuliaImages. I am not an org owner anymore, and can’t access the repository settings to fix TAGBOT keys.
Can an owner of JuliaImages please help fix this? I want to maintain ImageInpainting.jl at least.
@juliohm You should have the permissions back now.
I thought I should mention a couple of things:
Things that did require ownership in the past on github may not require it today. Sometimes when owners review org permissions and prune them, it may end up being over aggressive. If someone who had access and lost it - please do ask.
The other case is that existing owners may not have the time beyond existing maintenance, and if someone has had contributions to repos in an org and would like to step up for ownership, please do ask. I wonder if we should have a conversation in the community about a common process to bring new contributors and maintainers for packages.
We had a heated discussion on Zulip about this. I am not sure if any action will be taken, but the lack of explicit information on current maintainers of packages is a serious issue that is compromising the overall Julia experience and community.
My suggestion was to enforce a Maintainers.toml file in every registered package with a list of names currently responsible by the maintenance of the package. How would that improve the current situation? Well, at least we would have a name or two to ping in every registered package to ask for future directions or take over the maintenance. If the people listed don’t want to maintain a package anymore, that is fine, they can just remove themselves from the list. If the list is empty, the package is automatically marked as unmaintained. This is easy to enforce automatically on every package release.
The status quo is that we have tons of unmaintained packages inside organizations, and no one knows how to bring them back to life. The organization members are not the maintainers, and have been added accidentally to the organization due to past contributions to other packages. No one steps up, and the ecosystem gradually dies.
We have different personal experiences with open source, and in my opinion this situation in Julia is alarming. Talents are leaving seeing an ecosystem that is not maintained, packages that are half-working, and lack of information about who maintains what.
To clarify the issue with ImageInpaintaing.jl specifically, I am the original author of the package, and lost access to it. This is how serious the issue is: the current owners of JuliaImages didn’t know I was the author and removed my permissions from the repository accidentally.