rfcs/rfcs/0055-retired-committers.md

feature	start-date	author	co-authors	shepherd-team	shepherd-leader	related-issues
retired-committers	2019-08-25	Till Höppner	Graham Christensen	(names, to be nominated and accepted by RFC steering committee)	(name to be appointed by RFC steering committee)	(will contain links to implementation PRs)

Summary

Many people were given push access to the nixpkgs repository, which is kept even if these committers become inactive. This RFC proposes moving these contributors to a new team without push access.

Motivation

Each committer represents secrets and access which need to be managed carefully. These come in the form of passwords, SSH and GPG keys, and leaking them can put nixpkgs at risk of of unauthorized modification.

Because every secret with push access can be leaked, we should keep their number as low as necessary, here by deactivating the push access of inactive committers. A special case of inactive committers are those who have lost access to their GitHub account entirely, who would be unable to remove potentially leaked secrets from their account.

As of 2019-08-18, at least 2 committers have officially stepped down, and at least 1 committer has not pushed to nixpkgs since 2014, but are still able to push directly to nixpkgs.

If implemented in this form, and assuming no further contributions, 7 contributors will be moved at the beginning of 2020.

Detailed design

Inactive committers will have their push access disabled after not committing to nixpkgs for an entire year.

That year is measured from January 1 to December 31 instead of using a rolling window over the last 12 months, to be more predictable for committers and reduce the evaluations from 12 times a year to just once a year.

For each committer from the Nixpkgs Committers team, the number of commits in that time range is checked, and the committer is considered inactive if there are none.

Previous committers are moved to a new Nixpkgs Committers Emeritus team, to honor their past contributions. Members of this team will remain in the GitHub organisation, and may regain push access at a later time.

The process consists of the following steps:

• Running the reference implementation or a functionally equivalent application.
• Checking the correctness of the script output by manually inspecting the recent git history of inactive committers. This may be done by reviewing the activity page linked in the script output of the reference implementation.
• Notification of the confirmed inactive committers, via a GitHub issue and an email to the committers address, according to <nixpkgs/maintainers/maintainer-list.nix>. The text should include a notice on how to regain commit permissions. The exact process of that is not part of this RFC, as the process of becoming a committer in the first place is still not formalised.
• Moving of the confirmed inactive committers from the Nixpkgs Committers team team to the new Nixpkgs Committers Emeritus team, either directly if sufficient permissions are available, or indirectly by notifying an organisation administrator.

This process occurs once after the RFC is accepted, and is then repeated at the beginning of each new year.

@Mic92 has committed to performing the yearly process, but any member of the NixOS organisation can execute the above steps if @Mic92 does not remember to do so in a reasonable amount of time after the beginning of the year.

Drawbacks

• It might put pressure on people because they might lose their hard-earned permissions.
• Lower activity limits might encourage quota contributions of lower quality with the intention of not losing push access.

Alternatives

• Committers could keep push access forever.
• We could be even stricter, at the risk of higher contributor churn and losing low-frequency direct contributions.

Unresolved questions

• Is one year without commits a good activity threshold?
• How are committers informed about this change, or an impending revocation?

Future work

• The threshold may need adjustment in the future.

Reference implementation

#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -I nixpkgs=https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs-channels/archive/1412af4b2cfae71d447164097d960d426e9752c0.tar.gz -i python3 -p "python3.withPackages (p: [ p.PyGithub ])"

# nixpkgs-inactive-committers expects an API token passed in the environment as GITHUB_TOKEN
# Such a token can be created at https://github.com/settings/tokens
# Make sure to enable the read:org scope

from sys import stderr
from github import Github
from datetime import date, time, datetime
import os

year = date.today().year - 1
start_of_year = datetime.combine(date(year, 1, 1), time.min)

print(f'Reporting from {start_of_year}')

gh = Github(os.environ['GITHUB_TOKEN'],
        user_agent='nixpkgs-inactive-committers',
        per_page=100, timeout=90, retry=5)
print(gh.get_rate_limit(), file=stderr)

org = gh.get_organization('nixos')
nixpkgs = org.get_repo('nixpkgs')
committers = org.get_team_by_slug('nixpkgs-committers').get_members()
sorted_committers = sorted(list(committers), key=lambda c: c.login.lower())

def hasCommit(commits):
    # totalCount is borked, len(list(...)) eats too many API calls
    try:
        c = commits[0]
        return True
    except IndexError:
        return False

for member in sorted_committers:
    commits = nixpkgs.get_commits(author=member, since=start_of_year)

    if not hasCommit(commits):
        print(f'{member.login:<20} https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author={member.login}')