Call for maintainers

[sambhav]

Hello all,

As of late, I have been the only somewhat active maintainer for pydocstyle and I am in a position where I am finding less and less time to dedicate to this project.

As a consequence, @Nurdok and I have decided to do a call for maintainers.

Ideally we would love for the new maintainer to

• be an avid user or contributor to pydocstyle or a similar project (like sibling linting projects in PyCQA)
• have a good history of involvement in open source

The immediate tasks for new maintainer(s) would be to -

• Automate the release process
• Release the current set of contributions on the master branch
• Triage the issue backlog
• Review the current set of open PRs

Longer term, there are a few milestones on -

• Making conventions a first class concepts in pydocstyle as opposed to a group of issues
• Enhance the linting capabilities for numpy and Google docstyles

for more details see https://github.com/PyCQA/pydocstyle/milestone/7

If you are interested, feel free to reach out to us on the pydocstyle #general discord channel https://discord.gg/GAt2YQEXga or comment on this issue.

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

Hello @samj1912,

First, did you consider Tidelift ? The current estimated income is 15$/month, it's not much, but it could justify spending a couple hours on pydocstyle per month.

Second I'm maintaining pylint, and pylint is not using pydocstyle directly but often have check that are very close or even duplicate (we handle numpy/google docstyle in our docstring plugin). Knowing pydocstyle better could be a way to rationalize pylint and maybe use pydocstyle directly inside it. Maybe a way to decrease the maintenance required for both.

I'm not saying I'd have the time to triage everything and review all the PR but I can at least automate the release process and release periodically because I already did that for pylint/astroid/prospector so it's... probably not much than copy pasting yaml in .github/ and asking you for the proper rights on pypi or defining an env variable in the github settings.

Let me know what you think :)

[sambhav]

@Pierre-Sassoulas that sounds great! I am away on vacations for the next few weeks so I might be slow to respond but if you send over a github actions PR, I can make sure proper secrets are injected in the workflows.

I have not considered Tidelift. Thank you for the link, I will take a look :) I don't think that will massively change much, with regards to the current time I have available for pydocstyle.

[saroad2]

Maybe I can give you some assistance ☺️

For the past few months, I've been working on a dream project of mine: an orchestration tool for static code analysis that combines the power of the most common formatters and linters into a single tool. This project is called Statue and it's in a VERY early stage of development. As part of the default configuration of Statue, it runs Pydocestyle and Pylint along with Black, Isort, Flake8, Mypy and many other tools.

As I said, Statue is in a very early stage of development, mostly due to lack of documentation (which is something that I will start working on pretty soon). However, maybe as part of me working on Statue I can give you a hand on some of the things you work on here at Pydocstyle and PyCQA in general.

My main goal is to make writing clean code easy and fun, something I'm sure you'd agree with me is important. I can't commit for handling all the objectives you stated above, but maybe I can help with one or two.

Feel free to contact me via email and maybe we can continue discussing the details in private.

[sambhav]

@aphedges has also graciously volunteered to help out with the triage and review process. I have added them with triage permissions to the repository to help with issue and PR reviews. Thanks for your help.

@saroad2 will message you separately :)

[saroad2]

@samj1912 , Have you sent me an email? cause I didn't get it.

[benji-york]

I've used pydocstyle on several projects over the last few years and have some time and interest to put into this project. In fact, I just contributed my first PR—#595.

I have been involved with open source for nearly 20 years as both a maintainer and contributor on many projects.

[Stannislav]

Hi, I'd be happy to help as well.

I've been coding in python professionally for a number of years, and I've also contributed to open source before. I've used pydocstyle through the flake8-docstrings plugin a lot.

[adamjstewart]

We've been using pydocstyle in TorchGeo for the last couple of years and absolutely love it. I would be interested in helping to maintain pydocstyle. I'm particularly interested in solving overloading (#525, #555, #571, #577, #601, #613) and Google-style docstring support (#459, #589) as these are the main bugs that impact us. I can also provide advice on CI/release procedures. I don't have a ton of time to offer, and I'm not yet familiar with the internals of the project, but if people can point me to where to start I'm happy to help. Thanks for building the most underrated and underappreciated style tool in existence!

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

@adamjstewart regarding the CI, you could review #582 for the release process :)

[sambhav]

@adamjstewart, @Pierre-Sassoulas thank you so much for your contributions and interest.

Now that we have release automation in place and the current set of pending changes have been released, I think we are good to go WRT looking at the outstanding PRs and merging new functionality.

I think a good starter PR would be related to the functionality you have pointed to (overloading and Google docstyle fixes), as they were next on the release map.

Additionally if you wish to get familiar with the CI/CD process, having python 3.11 tests working would be awesome and would help unlock new functionality for us.

[sambhav]

Locking this thread for now since we have a good number of people interested in the maintanance.

@Pierre-Sassoulas given you are a pycqa admin, I'm more than happy to add you as a maintainer.

@adamjstewart I have given you triage permissions. Happy to elevate them once you have reviewed/contributed a couple of PRs.