Maintenance & Governance of standard

[mcollina]

After a long twitter thread and looking at the contribution graphs, it seems that to keep supporting Standard users, we need to come up with some new governance.

I maintain hundreds of packages relying on standard, Including the whole Fastify organization (discussion link fastify/fastify#5159). It seems simpler to help maintaining this than moving all of those to a different formatter / linter.

@feross said he would trust me to help with governance and kickstart the work again.

Should we schedule a quick call?

@standard/team @voxpelli @jsumners

[mightyiam]

A mob consisting of @rostislav-simonik , @jay-bulk and I are trying to adopt this project. We are working on it four hours weekly.

I say trying because we haven't yet received npm publish permission for anything other than eslint-config-standard-with-typescript.

Would you be interested in hopping in during one of our sessions?

Schedule here:
https://mobusoperandi.com/mobs/standard.html

[mcollina]

The mob programming model does not really work for the rest of us. I don't think I would be able to join your mob call anytime soon.

[mightyiam]

Sorry—just to clarify—the rest of us whom, please?

[jsumners]

Should we schedule a quick call?

Sure. I'll do what I can.

[mcollina]

Sorry—just to clarify—the rest of us whom, please?

Currently, no one is doing releases for this project, and it has essentially stalled.
I need this linter to be maintained and moved forward as I have hundreds of packages depending on it, and I offered @feross my help to set up a governance model for this project. In that long twitter thread it appeared that quite a few people would be happy to keep moving this forward, and after @feross tweet I opened a discussion.

@voxpelli has been doing releases for the last 2 years, and this initiative has its blessing as well.

Ultimately, I would prefer to move this forward vs forking, but forking is 100% an option.

cc @wesleytodd

[rhettjay]

@mcollina I'm the newest "member" to join the mob group. I'd be happy to hop on a call and fill in the gaps if the rest of the team is unable.

[mightyiam]

Sorry. Of course I'll be happy to join whatever call you're organizing. I'm also sorry that our mob did not receive @feross' trust by now and that this is happening instead. @feross did, however, let us know that he will look into our past contributions during December in order to assess his faith in us.

[mightyiam]

For context, eslint-config-standard-with-typescript, the package I've authored and have been maintaining for several years and more recently with the help of @rostislav-simonik and @jay-bulk in our mob seems at a level of popularity similar to the standard package.

For more context, here is a message I wrote earlier on Discord. And a copy-paste here:

Expanding Rostislav and mightyiam's contribution, into core

After years of working on eslint-config-standard-with-typescript, and more recently, regularly, in mob format, with the experienced, capable and cooperative @rostislav-simonik, it seems that in order for it to evolve with the ecosystem, the core packages eslint-config-standard and standard must also evolve.

eslint-config-standard-with-typescript is implemented in TypeScript, has a comprehensive test suite, linting of the code (of course), linting of commit messages (semantic commits), automatic dependency bumps (renovate), CI where all this happens, CD which makes automatic releases (including figuring out the version bump using semantic-release), a pre-commit hook and a commit-msg hook and has been developed in a principled manner.

To begin Rostislav's and I's contribution to core, we would like to begin by sharing this infrastructure with the core packages.

The first PR for that is already open at standard/eslint-config-standard#282.

Rostislav (for months) and I (for years) have been happily making arbitrary (read "tough") decisions regarding complex matters in eslint-config-standard-with-typescript and thus making progress persistently. (https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-standard-with-typescript/graphs/contributors).

In expanding our contribution into core, we would love to maintain a similar attitude, albeit with extra care, both because changes in core affect a wider user base and because in core more fundamental changes can be made.

Having communicated this, we are going to proceed in this fashion.

Technicality: Rostislav had admin role in eslint-config-standard-with-typescript for a while. I gave him owner role in the org today.

Technicality: there seems to be a branch protection in place, at least in eslint-config-standard, where at least one review is required. Since Rostislav and I work in mob programming format, we will be approving the PRs that create in this format ourselves.

We couldn't get far on any package other than eslint-config-standard-with-typescript due to lack of npm publish permissions on them.

We are three capable developers who've for the past few months have been blocked from maintaining this package set by lack of faith.

And now someone else who seems to have won @feross faith is tasked to organize governance.

This doesn't make me feel wanted.

[wesleytodd]

Based on this issue it sounds like official governance to maintain commit/publish access would be very helpful. Even the best individual maintainers cannot keep juggling everything, and the "lack of faith" problem is more about not having a governance model in place for building that trust. Really happy to help out here, especially knowing there are people who want to do the work.

[voxpelli]

I'm +1 on @mcollina here, but I guess you know my point of view on this @mightyiam

[voxpelli]

First task of your group @mightyiam should be to at least get ts-standard up to date: standard/ts-standard#291

Before that's done there's nothing showing that you are aware of or in line with the philosophy of this project

[mightyiam]

@voxpelli that was aggressive.

[mightyiam]

I'm not sure I have npm publish permission for that package.

[theoludwig]

The issue of maintenance & governance of Standard definitely makes sense, as the maintenance/development is quite inactive outside of eslint-config-standard-with-typescript.

Standard need maintainers volunteers, there are already @mightyiam showing his interest and others.
I'm not against it, and it's really cool that there are still people interested in maintaining Standard, so I'm all for it. 😄

Now... Not everyone agrees, and I can understand that giving npm publish permission to someone is risky and the decision should be taken carefully.

Maybe, the current maintainers having the npm permissions, could at least review the PRs and release new versions when needed, building the trust in collaboration with the ones submitting the PRs.
After a while, the people submitting the PRs could be granted the permissions to publish on npm, and continue forward.

We might also define the list of TODOs and the goals of Standard moving forward, what I see already are the following issues:

• Remove style rules #1872 and Eslint v9 support #1939 somewhat the related issues that made this issue "critical", even if the issue was already there before them.
• Deprecate and point to eslint-config-standard-with-typescript ts-standard#291 ts-standard should be in sync with eslint-config-standard-with-typescript, if updates are pushed for the config, ts-standard should receive a update too
• See how to move forward in eslint-config-standard with flat ESLint v9 config

And probably lot more TODOs...

[wesleytodd]

Some example governence docs for reference:

• https://github.com/fastify/fastify/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md
• https://github.com/expressjs/express/blob/master/Charter.md
• https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md

I think it is important to scale the governence process to the project scope. I don't think something as complicated as Node's is needed here, but also express's is a bit lacking imo. I really like the way fastify structures this, and I think a few key things need to be established:

1. Central TC with final decision making authority, ideally with a majority vote model
2. Distributed control of the individual packages so that folks can make fast progress in those areas.
3. A method of managing access right, and a path to go from a new contributor to a maintainer

If having a sustainable model is the goal, we need some more generic governance practices before really digging into the list of todos imo. Not that it should stop folks from working on those, but to keep things going smoothly with a large group there needs to be some small structure around the goals and decision making.

[rostislav-simonik]

Hello,

All topics mentioned here are essential, but I suggest not deviating too much.

The most pressing issue now is to unblock those willing to spend time on this project because the most precious thing they offer is their time. I understand that new people could have different objectives, and original maintainers are cautious that we won't deviate from the original purpose of this project.

To mitigate this risk, let's try to capture goals and principles a little bit better. So, each contributor can follow them, and PR reviews would become a formality rather than a necessity.

During work on eslint-config-standard-with-typescript, we were following a few rules.

• Follow the upstream - If there is eslint rule in standard already we just made the typescript one to that image
• if it's unclear, let's pick the one that makes the code safer but not harms existing users too much.

But there were a few cases where we had the dilemma of what would be the option, not violating upstream concept principles.

So if @feross and the other original maintainers could spend one hour or two to capture those principles into some standard bible, it would make our decision-making much easier.

And then who would have lead decisions or who will own the npm access tokens, would be the least concern.

[anonrig]

I'd be also interested in maintaining Standard.

[bcomnes]

I vote for forks, and then if any of them become a clear successor, feross can consider re-merging. My sense is that conflicting interests/priorities have developed over time and are a major factor in lack of maintenance.

I'm also open to an open governance approach, but it also depends on what that turns into.

Generally my priorities would be:

• A low/no config/debate linting tool in the style of the node.js ecosystem
• Basic formatting built in with a --fix flag (single tool/rule set linting + formatting)
• LSP support
• Configuration around contentious topics (asi min-maxing)
• Basic zero-config typecript/jsx support (should just run on common non-standard syntaxes without fuss).

[wesleytodd]

I agree on those priorities I think, but I am not sure why forking is better. Forking means many people need to make changes across hundreds of repos. I have not followed all the convos here, so I can probably brush up on what has been going on, but is there an example of something that is an incompatible opinion among contributors in this ecosystem?

[rostislav-simonik]

is there an example of something that is an incompatible opinion among contributors in this ecosystem?

Like this one Basic formatting built-in with a --fix flag (single tool/rule set linting + formatting) , it's one of the challenging topics. There are two groups, one that believes standard should abandon all formatting rules and leave it for formatters like prettier, and then the other one that expects that standard should be zero-config tool that gives you everything.

But I was always wondering why both couldn't live. What prevents having a formatless config and then another that lives above that?

[wesleytodd]

Yeah, these are the kinds of topics you have a TC and governance doc to help guide a decision for. Ideally that governance group represents the diverse opinions of the users of the project, but even if not should strive to resolve the discussion in a way that keeps it healthy. Nothing in that topic (although controversial) seems like something impossible to reconcile. It seems like right now the problem is not even agreeing on a direction but shipping anything. So maybe we unlock the ability to make small uncontroversial changes now and then make the second agenda item listing and deciding on a direction for those more contravertial changes?

[dcousens]

If you used a GitHub action with required reviewers to publish, could that help unblock progress?

[voxpelli]

If you used a GitHub action with required reviewers to publish, could that help unblock progress?

Problem is lack of governance not lack of publishing

[rostislav-simonik]

@mcollina, so what are the next steps? When do you plan to throw a meeting? Can we please pencil the agenda for that call? Do we have some expectations of what we should prepare before the call?

If I could provide my requirements ahead of time, then those would be mostly related to typescript ecosystem and automated CI

• to establish clear goals and principles for adding new rules or maintaining existing
• to establish a RACI matrix between standard and standard-with-typescript. Changes in the standard config have an impact on the typescript config.
• e2e & unit-tests & automatic releases
• eslint flat config

[wesleytodd]

I would push us to have a discussion that is not that in the weeds initially. All of those topics are pretty in the weeds and getting governance in place is more high level. So the meeting should discuss project leadership, decision making guidance, how to manage access and publish rights, etc. And then all those points can be for later discussions or async in issues.

[rostislav-simonik]

Yes, I agree. I listed them mostly to understand which group I belong to.

Ideally, it would be best if the governance model would incorporate rules for effectively transferring responsibilities from concerning people who become busy with something else. Or effective substitution,

Because that's what is/was the current issue. Not the lack of interest to maintain/govern, but not having enough time to onboard new group.

[mightyiam]

By the way, from CONTRIBUTING:

Project Governance

Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to the
project to contribute as they see fit. This project is more like an open wiki than a
standard guarded open source project.

[rlidwka]

If you care about the thousands of users of these packages, grant us npm publish access while we continue to discuss governance.

Maintaining an open source project does not require npm publish access.

Maintaining an open source project means answering to all the issue tickets, reviewing all the pull requests, and creating new pull requests if a feature is frequently requested, but nobody else is up to do so.

That's the bulk of the work, and it does not require any governance changes, and any permissions whatsoever.

Here's a hundred open issues with zero answers and nobody available to sort them out. If you care about the thousand of users of these packages, you can start right there:
https://github.com/standard/standard/issues

[LinusU]

I've been a part of Standard for a very long time, and from my feelings the goal of the project have always been to align itself with what people are already using, and only introduce breaking change when we can see that the absolute majority of all projects using standard are already compliant.

That's why a lot of my work have been contributing fixes to other projects ahead of us adding new lint rules, and creating ecosystem analysis reports when we are thinking about adding a new rule.

---

With the recent development in eslint-config-standard-with-typescript, there have been too many breaking changes recently which has lead us to stop using it at my company.

I think that this can be seen in the wider ecosystem by looking at the number of downloads for the different versions, e.g. from last week:

• 40.x - 3k
• 39.x - 133k
• 37.x - 39k
• 36.x - 21k
• 35.x - 25k
• 34.x - 117k
• 23.x - 82k
• 22.x - 34k
• 21.x - 30k
• 20.x - 10k

ref: https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-config-standard-with-typescript?activeTab=versions

That's a lot of people using old (in terms of number of major versions behind latest) versions...

Compared to eslint-config-standard:

• 17.x - 1625k
• 16.x - 489k
• 15.x - 15k
• 14.x - 327k
• 13.x - 29k
• 12.x - 128k
• 11.x - 65k
• 10.x - 52k

ref: https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-config-standard?activeTab=versions

---

Personally, I would love for the regular Standard to also handle TypeScript, and for it to continue on a slow path forward where new rules are only added after we have verified that the ecosystem already is compliant.

I also have a lot of open source repositories that uses Standard, so I would really not like to see many major releases which requires manual updates.

---

I would be happy to stay on as a maintainer of Standard, if it continues with the philosophy that it has had before, which I described in my first paragraphs here.

---

Finally, I would like to offer my apologies to @mightyiam & @rostislav-simonik. I've seen that you have tried to reach out to me on Discord. Since I only use that when I game or socialize with my friends, it has never been a good time to write out my thoughts clearly when I've seen it. But I felt that the direction that you have taken with the TypeScript standard hasn't been aligned with the philosophy of Standard, and thus I didn't want to give you publish access without this being discussed first. I'm sorry that I didn't initiate this discussion earlier, but I'm happy that it's taking place now!

[mightyiam]

Thank you, @LinusU. There's no problem with frequent introduction of generally desirable rules. Users can upgrade at their own pace. Perhaps I should take eslint-config-standard-with-typescript somewhere else and rebrand it.

[voxpelli]

Perhaps I should take eslint-config-standard-with-typescript somewhere else and rebrand it.

@mightyiam This has been my proposal all along but your response has been that without the standard branding you wouldn’t get any users.

I think this would be the ideal solution. Moving eslint-config-standard-with-typescript to its own organization with its own governance and standard moving forward with the governance that @mcollina is spearheading

I could for sure help out facilitate the moving of repositories and modules to such a new organization of yours.

This I think would make you and your collaborators and users the happiest and eg me the happiest 😌

[LinusU]

There's no problem with frequent introduction of generally desirable rules. Users can upgrade at their own pace. Perhaps I should take eslint-config-standard-with-typescript somewhere else and rebrand it.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that one approach is better than the other, and I think that it's great that you have been putting work into something that I hope is enjoyed by people! ❤️

I'm just saying that it's not a great fit for me personally, the way I'm using Standard.

[rostislav-simonik]

Finally, I would like to offer my apologies to @mightyiam & @rostislav-simonik. I've seen that you have tried to reach out to me on Discord. Since I only use that when I game or socialize with my friends,

No worries, it's ok.

Guys, the conversation got heated somehow, meantime 😉 . Everybody has good intentions here. It's just that nobody has a crystal ball, so some incompatible decisions were assumed in good faith. That's why I asked to capture the original maintainers' expectations because that info would make it all easier.

@voxpelli @mcollina I understand now that the standard ecosystem expects less drastic changes. That's reasonable.

On sessions with @mightyiam, we chose to do breaking changes more often but with a more minor impact. That comes of course, with not receiving patches or minor updates without mandatory modifications.

Both approaches are viable, but each must be consistent with their users.

And we unintentionally mixed them. So If some changes are incompatible with the standard users, let's revert.

If there is still a will, Let's capture some rules and expectations, and if we agree on them, we can continue. If not, then we separate. There are no wrong options, just options.

@mcollina @voxpelli, is there still an option on the table to have that call where each group can present their own expectations to find out if there is an intersection?

[mightyiam]

Please see #1957.

[mcollina]

I have been in contact with @feross and I'm making progress on this - not much to update on yet.

[rhettjay]

@mcollina it's been almost two months since the last update. I've tried reaching out to you and @feross via twitter to offer assistance. Do you have an estimated time line on when you think we'll start to see progress here?

Sorry, I'm not trying to be a nuisance. You and Feross are both juggling running companies and multiple libraries which is very respectable. I've got projects that would like to see continued maintenance on this repo. However this thread is getting a little long in the tooth. For reference, I reached out to Feross on the issue of maintenance back in September. I want to be helpful but I'm also feeling slightly hand tied without permissions/governance in place.

[voxpelli]

@jay-bulk We’re still actively working on this

[mcollina]

I've not been able to reach to feross to discuss this any further.

[Bugs5382]

@mcollina Hey there. So.. I am up for this as well and use ts-standard, in all my projects including the ones for fastify plugins. So let me know!

[voxpelli]

Since we sadly could reach no conclusion on this me, @mcollina, @wesleytodd, @bcomnes have gone ahead and created the neostandard project that aims to carry the torch forward under an open governance model.

[rhettjay]

Finally a resolution, marvelous! Thank you @voxpelli @mcollina @bcomnes @wesleytodd

[bcomnes]

I see this as an effort to eliminate some indecision paralysis while trying some bolder ideas. Thanks for the hard work from everyone involved and I hope the efforts will benefit the community going forward. FWIW, I'm open to reconciling efforts in the future if that possibility makes sense.

[theoludwig]

Probably time to deprecate standard, if no one want to maintain it anymore.
Should probably update the README to tell people, it is not recommended to use in new projects, and instead recommend other projects like https://github.com/neostandard/neostandard.

[bcomnes]

I think deprecation would be premature at this point.