Issue Supervisor Role

This document formally defines the Issue Supervisor role. This is a repository maintenance role that is assigned to core contributors on a rotating basis.

Responsibilities

The issue supervisor is responsible for:

The health of the CI, nightly releases and benchmark infrastructure.
PRs of external contributors: assigning someone to review, or handling themselves.
Triaging issues (especially new):
- Each issue needs to be assigned an itype and 1 or more area labels.
- Where applicable, new issues need to be designated for the Spree or Semester projects with the corresponding labels.
- Regressions from an earlier Scala 3 release must be classified with the “regression” label and assigned to the next release’s milestone.
- Modifying issue labels to best capture information about the issues
  - Attempting to reproduce the issue (or label “stat:cannot reproduce”)
  - Further minimizing the issue or asking the reporter of the issue to minimize it correctly (or label “stat:needs minimization”)
- Identifying which issues are of considerable importance and bringing them to the attention of the team during the Dotty meeting, where they can be filtered and added to the Future Versions milestone.
- Identifying if a report is really a feature request and if so, converting it to a feature request discussion.
Keeping an eye on new discussions, making sure they don't go unanswered and also correctly labeling new feature requests.

Other core teammates are responsible for providing information to the issue supervisor in a timely manner when it is requested if they have that information.

Assignment

The issue supervisor is appointed for 7 days and is responsible for what is specified in the “Responsibilities” section during those 7 days. Their assumption of the role starts from the Dotty Meeting on Monday and ends on the next Dotty Meeting on Monday.

During the Dotty Meeting, an issue supervisor is assigned for the current week and for the week after that.

The issue supervisor schedule is maintained in the Issue Supervisor Statistics spreadsheet. So, someone who knows their availability several weeks ahead into the future can assign themselves to be an issue supervisor well ahead of time.

Prerequisites

An issue supervisor needs to have all the accesses and privileges required to get their job done. This might include:

Admin rights in lampepfl/dotty repository
Permission to create new repositories in lampepfl organization (needed to fork repositories for the community build)
Access to the LAMP slack to be able to ask for help with the infrastructure, triaging and such

Procedures

To ensure the proper health of the infrastructure, the supervisor regularly monitors its proper operation. If a malfunction is detected, the supervisor's job is to ensure that someone is working on it (or solve it on their own).

If it is unclear what area an issue belongs to, the supervisor asks for advice from other team members on Slack or GitHub. If, after asking for advice, it turns out that nobody in the team knows how to classify it, the issue must be classified with a “stat:needs triage” label.

If it is unclear who should review an external PR, the supervisor asks for advice from the rest of the core team. If after asking for advice, it is still unclear who should do it, the reviewer for such a PR will be decided at the next Dotty meeting.

In general, if anything else is unclear for the proper fulfillment of responsibilities, the supervisor must proactively seek advice from other team members on Slack or other channels.

Reporting

At the end of their supervision period, the supervisor reports to the team during the Dotty meeting on the following points:

Whether there were any incidents with the CI, nightlies and benchmarks, how they were resolved and what steps were taken to prevent them from happening in the future.
How many new external contributors’ PRs were there and what they were about (in brief).
How many new issues were opened during their supervision period? Were there any areas that got a lot of issues? How many regressions from a prior Scala 3 release were there? Which were designated for an MSc project or an Issue Spree?
If new labels were created or old ones were removed, or there is any other feedback on how to improve the issue supervision, mention that.
Unassigned PRs and issues that the team failed to classify: bring them one by one so that the team can make a decision on them.
Issues of importance – candidates for the Future Versions milestone.

Maintenance List

The following is the list of all the principal areas of the compiler and the internal team members who are responsible for their maintenance:

Compiler

Parser: @odersky
Typer: @odersky, @noti0nal, @bracevac, (@smarter)
Erasure: @odersky, (@smarter)
Enums: @zielinsky
Derivation & Mirrors:
Export: @odersky
Pattern Matching: @sjrd, @noti0na1, @zielinsky
Inline: @odersky, @jchyb
Metaprogramming (Quotes, Reflect, Staging): @jchyb
Match types: @sjrd, @Linyxus
GADT: @Linyxus
Initialization checker: @liufengyun, @olhotak, @EnzeXing
Transforms: @sjrd, @odersky, @smarter
Tailrec: @sjrd, @mbovel
JS backend: @sjrd
JVM backend: @sjrd, @tanishiking, @lrytz
Java-compat: @tanishiking, @lrytz, (@smarter)
Extension Methods: @odersky
Safe nulls (experimental): @noti0na1
Capture checker (experimental): @odersky, @Linyxus, @bracevac, @noti0na1
Modularity (experimental): (@KacperFKorban)
Named Tuples: @odersky, @aherlihy
Standard library: @lrytz, @SethTisue, @natsukagami, @noti0na1

Tooling

REPL:
Runner/CLI: @Gedochao, (@tgodzik)
IDE: @tgodzik, @zielinsky
Scaladoc: (@Florian3k)
SemanticDB: @natsukagami, (@tanishiking)
Coverage: (@KacperFKorban)
Linting (especially unused warnings) / Reporting UX: @som-snytt, (@tgodzik)
Presentation Compiler: @tgodzik, @natsukagami, @zielinsky, (@rochala)
Debug Adapter: @tgodzik
Scastie: @warcholjakub, (@rochala)

Infrastructure

CI: @WojciechMazur
Community Build: @WojciechMazur
Open Community Build: @WojciechMazur
Vulpix:
Benchmarks: @mbovel
Releases: @WojciechMazur (Scala 3 Next), @tgodzik (Scala 3.3 LTS)