introduce development procedures/community process

[mfrey]

In order to engage more fellow hackers to contribute to CCN-lite, I would propose that we first adapt RIOTs development procedures for CCN-lite and second, have a look at RIOTs community Processes.

We don't have to use RIOTs defined guides and processes, but I think it is a good starting point. I suggest that I will set up the corresponding wiki pages and we can discuss the pages here (in this issue). If it comes down to mailing lists/f2f meetings etc. I think this requires a "critical mass" and can be handled later.

I think we have some bits & pieces already in place (e.g. the PR settings (which require some documentation/guide)), but we can improve. Like the linux kernel janitor project we could for example think of introducing janitor tasks, i.e. simple contributions tasks for people new to CCN-lite (the basis could be our TODO list in the wiki).

Any thoughts? Particularly, @cgundogan @blacksheeep @cmarxer @waehlisch

[blacksheeep]

I support that. And I am looking forward to your wiki page.
The janitor task sounds interesting, depending on how many people using this project are willing to contribute.

[cgundogan]

Yes, I also agree on this. We should definitely use RIOTs community processes as a basis to come up with some simple rules and practices. Another important step for community bulding is to finally activate the mailing list. @blacksheeep do you have access to ccn-lite.net and can you provide a mailing list on that domain?

[blacksheeep]

The domain is managed by ITS-Unibas. As far as I know, I will not get a mailing list on that domain, since they have to be ending with unibas.ch by policy.
We already have:
[email protected]

[cgundogan]

@blacksheeep oh okay. How can I subscribe there?

[blacksheeep]

Here you go:
https://www.maillist.unibas.ch/mailman/listinfo/ccn-lite

[mfrey]

I've clearly underestimated the work load. This is clearly going to take some time. I've put up a preliminary (obviously) development procedures wiki page which in turn point to non-existing or half-filled/empty wiki pages on other topics.

[mfrey]

I've also added the community process. If you have some time, please go over the two pages and make changes or propose changes over here.

I'm not entirely sure about the maintainer/contributor thing. I'm a contributor, but not a maintainer (if it comes down to the definition), but have PR rights - we probably should align this.

Please also check the maintainers list in the wiki.

[blacksheeep]

That looks all pretty good!

[PeterKietzmann]

@mfrey the wiki looks promising! In my personal opinion pages such as "maintainers" and "roadmap" tend to become outdated. Furthermore, "roadmaps" tend to duplicate issues. How about pointing to a public peoples/maintainers list provided by GitHub (something like https://github.com/orgs/RIOT-OS/people ) and to a "search by label" in the issue tracker for the roadmap?

[mfrey]

@PeterKietzmann Thanks for the feedback! I totally agree, we should avoid to provide information which becomes soon outdated. The roadmap page was named todo before and probably covered the purpose better - it was and probably still is a list of things various people noticed while going through the code.

About the people/maintainers list - as far as I can see RIOT has different roles which are provided by GitHubs organization mechanisms. In order to copy this "behaviour" people would need to become members of the cn-uofbasel group or ccn-lite moves to a new group maintained by cn-uofbasel and a few other (active) members/contributors of ccn-lite, saying that I'm not really sure if the project is ready for this huge step. But, maybe you meant something completely different?