building a long term maintenance strategy for wasm-pack

[ashleygwilliams]

there should be a set of people who maintain this project. let's find that set of people and figure out how to set them up for success.

if you are interested in becoming a maintainer of wasm-pack, please reach out to me at ashley666ashley@gmail.com.

[00imvj00]

I really really want to get on this. very new to wasm and good in rust, but the heart is there. :)

[AlphaHot]

@ashleygwilliams I'd like to help, but I'm new to wasm

[colelawrence]

I can't offer a lot of support for new feature development, but I would be happy to find lightweight or advisory responsibilities over pull requests and direction. My company's central product is built with wasm-pack and TypeScript (and several bespoke codegen tools for Rust and TypeScript type safety).

[ashleygwilliams]

hey folks! if you've replied here, please also email me at ashley666ashley@gmail.com to make sure i can send you a response! thanks again for reaching out and wanting to help wasm-pack. GitHub issues are not well designed to have threaded conversations, so it'll be easier for me to talk to each of you personally via email.

[kettle11]

@ashleygwilliams's point makes sense that it's unwise to transfer ownership to a defunct group just because the name sounds official.

But that raises a few questions:

• What is the state of the working group?
• Can the working group be improved enough to safely take ownership of wasm-pack?
• If the working group is beyond repair what does that mean for its other projects?

@fitzgen is listed here as the sole member of the Rust WebAssembly working group and the team leader. Is @fitzgen still the leader of the working group? If so he should weigh in as well.

[ashleygwilliams]

@kettle11 historically there has been a core team of the rustwasm working group, that consisted of me, @alexcrichton, @fitzgen, and for a time, @Pauan. do we think we could move this question to a new issue on the team repo https://github.com/rustwasm/team? it's probably a better place for this conversation :)

i would like to move the search for wasm-pack maintainers forward and not block on reviving the working group. this is because i think re-establishing the working group will take a lot longer and will involve more things than setting up a new maintainership for this single project (both will be significant and different effort). that being said, i am eager to see the group revived and super support all efforts to do so!

[kettle11]

i would like to move the search for wasm-pack maintainers forward and not block on reviving the working group. this is because i think re-establishing the working group will take a lot longer and will involve more things than setting up a new maintainership for this single project

That sounds like a good assessment and a pragmatic approach.

Just to summarize key points from what you've said:

• In the immediate term the focus should be on getting wasm-pack up and running with new maintainers
• Transferring publish rights from yourself to the WASM working group is a bad idea because it's a large group of inactive members, which may pose a security risk.
• Long term it may be possible to revive the WASM working group, but that requires significant effort and getting wasm-pack to a good spot should come first.

From my perspective that all makes sense.

And thanks for creating wasm-pack and many of the Rust+Wasm resources! It's a (perhaps not ideal) testament to the value of your work that people are so passionate with their opinions about wasm-pack's future.

Hopefully members of the community who are invested in Rust + Wasm will step up and help!

[pauldorehill]

At its core this is an issue of a personal crate existing under the guise of a working group crate. The cleanest solution would be to transfer the crate back to @ashleygwilliams and out of the rustwasm organization:

• It's then clearly Ashley's decision on how to move forward with maintaining crate
• While the rustwasm group is in its current state of semi stasis it doesn't have the implied responsibility for maintaining it

[ashleygwilliams]

@kettle11 yup! that's a great summary.

@pauldorehill i don't think that's a great idea. the reason i don't think that is a great idea is because rustwasm, while a defunct group of people, is still a coherent and coupled set of software and resources. there are several templates, books, examples, and docs, in this repo that are coupled with wasm-pack. many of those also need some love and depend on wasm-pack to work and be effective.

i've been considering if creating a new wasm-pack org is the right call. or simply focusing on getting maintainership of wasm-pack as step 1 in the process of reviving the rustwasm working group. personally i would much prefer to see this as step one of getting the working group back to a normal spot. i'm not sure it's useful or necessary to transfer several repositories out of this org in an effort to eventually transfer them back in. if my other rustwasm colleagues feel differently i'm happy to reconsider, but for the moment i don't see any value of moving it.

---

While the rustwasm group is in its current state of semi stasis it doesn't have the implied responsibility for maintaining it

and just to address this point for what i hope is the last time:

there is no rustwasm group of people. any repos/crates existing in a rustwasm org implies a set of rustwasm people. moving wasm-pack doesn't change this sense of implied maintenance. nearly every repo in this org has that implication and is not being maintained, from the rustwasm book, to the team repo, to gloo and twiggy. i understand that no one seems upset about those resources at the moment, but they are in the same state. as we think about solutions, i think we should be considering that this is not wasm-pack "leaving a working group" but that we are in a place of rebuilding the working group, at first, just for wasm-pack.

[frehberg]

In terms of code, what needs to be done? Is there any roadmap? Any TODOs?

[ashleygwilliams]

@frehberg i'm hoping to come up with a brief roadmap/todos in #929 - and then once a group of maintainers is brought together and is done getting out the next release we can set up a more formal plan of action. if you have any suggestions please feel free to comment on the aforementioned issue!

i'm running a bit behind because of a personal issue but i am hoping to have a kick off meeting with folks next week (sending emails out tomorrow, apologies for the delay).

[drager]

I think it would be a good idea to keep this repository and others (such as https://github.com/rustwasm/binary-install) in an organization, just like we have today. The problem is though that the group of people who consist of this rustwasm group is somewhat inactive right now and have been for a couple of months before. I think it would be good to do some planning and set a roadmap and which people should be involved in this as you're saying @ashleygwilliams.

[beyera]

@drager & @ashleygwilliams: I'll add yet another call for please adding someone else to help maintain this project. I'd be happy to donate some time, but there's plenty of small meaningful MRs going undressed.

[drager]

@drager & @ashleygwilliams: I'll add yet another call for please adding someone else to help maintain this project. I'd be happy to donate some time, but there's plenty of small meaningful MRs going undressed.

I'm planning on releasing a 0.9.2 with just the binary-install fix and then go through the latest issues/PRs and publish a 0.10.2 as soon as I'm done with that. In the meantime, feel free to review PRs and let me know what you expect from wasm-pack further down the road. Thanks 😊

[somethingelseentirely]

So happy to see some activity! ❤️
Can't wait to pass that --weak-refs flag to bindgen some day 😅 ✨

[tv42]

This issue seems to one of the two new issues mentioned in #914 without linking. Since #914 is now locked, mention it here so hopefully it'll cross-reference right.

[ms-ati]

Checking in from the future (Mon, Dec 20 2021) -- what is the current state of finding new maintainers for wasm-pack?

[stephanemagnenat]

Could the foundation help with this? Maybe by having a tiny part of the infrastructure funding supporting the maintenance of this crate?

[ms-ati]

Checking in again from the farther future (Fri, Jan 13 2023) -- what is the current state of finding new maintainers for wasm-pack?