I found out about Mentorship Program for New Ansible Release Managers today from @anwesha. It seems this was not discussed with the release managers or the SC before it was announced, which would’ve been ideal. It’s hard to have a discussion about something like this after the fact, and I felt a bit blindsided.
I think it’s great to get more people involved in the Ansible project, but I do have some questions/concerns about this particular program, so it would be great to hear more about it from the Community Team.
Generally, release managers have been Red Hat employees or people deeply involved in other areas of the project — the steering committee (SC membership or just participation in discussions and meetings), collection maintainership, release tooling maintainership, and/or distribution packaging. Releasing the community package requires the highest level of permissions and access to the package relied on by very many users, so I’m not sure it’s the best place to start for completely new contributors.
The Ansible community package release process is mostly automated and we have 5 release managers already, so I wonder if this program could focus more on activities adjacent to the community package process that need more help such as
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Submitting PRs to release the community execution environment and increasing automation there.
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Working on improving release process documentation. There were some remaining tasks in Improve release process documentation · Issue #221 · ansible-community/ansible-build-data · GitHub to move things out of the README and into dedicated pages in the docs directory.
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Contributing to the antsibull build scripts
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Testing collections and ensuring adherence with the collection requirements. GitHub - ansible-community/package-test-results: Coordination for Ansible package-wide testing was one example of this that could be revived, but it kind of fizzled out as my time/ability to contribute has been more limited.
It’d be great to hear more about the plans for this initiative or if anyone else on the Release Management WG or SC have thoughts here.