Collection removal process: make it similar to inclusion (i.e. w/o a vote if not requested)

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UPDATE: the PR is closed and the discussion is marked as resolved

I support the idea of @ssbarnea to make the collection removal process similar to inclusion, i.e. to get rid of a vote if not explicitly requested.
I’ve opened a PR [Needs SC vote before merge] Collection removal process: make it similar to inclusion (i.e. w/o a vote if not requested) by Andersson007 · Pull Request #1953 · ansible/ansible-documentation · GitHub.
Let’s discuss it.

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Could you describe the motivation for this change?

Not a lot of detail here or in the PR about why we would default to not voting.

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The motivation is the same as we introduced for inclusion: reduce a burden for SC a little bit

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I don’t think we should remove the vote; right now we only have votes in cases where judgement on the part of the SC is needed. In cases where it is clear (like collection got deprecated by its maintainers) there’s no vote required anyway.

(Also can you link to the idea? I think I missed it.)

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  • The idea was mentioned in our 1:1 conversation
  • I think deprecation by maintainers is relatively a rare case

If maintainers 1. don’t report in the issue that they’ve fixed requirements violations or 2. don’t respond at all in topics/issues in cases of unmaintained collections, is there a real need for a vote?
If there is, anyone can ask for the vote anyway:)

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I know it can sometimes be painful and take a fair bit of time, though we have seen Collection Maintainers reappear and get their collections into a better state. I’d personally like to see the vote remain.

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I would hope that the discussion before the vote is already enough motivation for that :wink: But I still would prefer to keep the vote. Removing a collection is a rather harsh reaction, which should have some more checks IMO.

(Considering that we’re very rarely adding collections nowadays, we might even talk about re-adding the ‘vote on adding’, especially if we want to be more strict on the package size. But that’s a totally different discussion, so let’s keep it out of here :wink: )

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I tend to keep the vote. Removing a collection is somewhat different from adding a new one.

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We discussed this in today’s Community WG meeting and agreed that without a vote, removing a collection from the Ansible Community Package feels arbitrary - “someone removed this collection because we can, and nobody objected”. When we vote, we make it clear that the Steering Committee (SC) approves of each removal. And when a SC member votes against removing a collection, we can ask why they object.

So voting is more about making sure people support the removal, rather than searching for someone who might object to the removal.

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As there’s a large support to keep the vote, let’s then just keep it.
Cool, putting the resolved label and closing the PR, thanks everyone for your feedback!

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