How to offboard maintainers

[isuruf]

Maintainers go away due to various reasons and the question becomes what to do about maintainership of feedstocks.
If the feedstock has more maintainers, we just remove the maintainer.

If the feedstock has no maintainer, there are two scenarios

1. Feedstock is a leaf node

• Open an admin-request to archive the feedstock

2. Feedstock is not a leaf node.

• Open an issue in the feedstock that the feedstock is abandoned. Then cc all maintainers from downstreams.

All of this can be done as an admin-request.

Any thoughts on this @conda-forge/core ?

[beckermr]

Above, did you mean "if a feedstock has no maintainer"?

Assuming that is true, then yes I think this plan sounds sensible.

[isuruf]

Yes, sorry for the typo

[isuruf]

I looked at the members of conda-forge. We have 6.2k members, but we also have 5.7k members who did not join after becoming a maintainer. The criteria for offboarding need to be thought out, but that should be a different issue "Who do we offboard"

[beckermr]

I wonder if we should reverse the staged-recipes workflow and require folks to join conda-forge before the recipe can be merged?

[ocefpaf]

Many users send a package to stage-recipes as a one-and-done action. They ignore the email to join on purpose b/c they don't want to really get involved any further. IMO this is a risk that is part of our model.

I wonder if we should reverse the staged-recipes workflow and require folks to join conda-forge before the recipe can be merged?

I'm not sure that would make a difference in how they behave. The, what I believe is the average maintainer who does this, would be part of the group but still inactive.