GNU Guix maintainer collective expands

Ludovic Courtès, Ricardo Wurmus — 2019-10- 5

In July, we—Ricardo Wurmus and Ludovic Courtès—called for volunteers to join us in maintaining Guix. We are thrilled to announce that three brave hackers responded and that they’re now officially co-maintainers! The Guix maintainer collective now consists of Marius Bakke, Maxim Cournoyer, and Tobias Geerinckx-Rice, in addition to Ricardo and Ludovic. You can reach us all by email at guix-maintainers@gnu.org, a private alias.

So what does it mean to be a maintainer? There are some duties:

Enforcing GNU and Guix policies, such as the project’s commitment to be released under a copyleft free software license (GPLv3+) and to follow the Free System Distribution Guideline (FSDG).
Enforcing our code of conduct: maintainers are the contact point for anyone who wants to report abuse.
Making decisions, about code or anything, when consensus cannot be reached. We’ve probably never encountered such a situation before, though!

Maintainers should have a good idea of what’s going on, but the other responsibilities can (and should! :-)) be delegated. Maybe you, dear reader, can help on one of them? Here are some examples:

Making releases. Any experienced developer can take this responsibility for some time.
Dealing with development and its everyday issues as well as long-term roadmaps, branch merges, code review, bug triage, all that.
Participating in Outreachy and Google Summer of Code (GSoC).
Organizing the Guix Days before FOSDEM and our presence at FOSDEM and other conferences.
Taking care of Guix money kindly donated by dozens of people and held at the FSF. A Spending Committee currently consisting of Tobias, Ricardo, and Ludovic, is responsible for deciding on, well, what to spend money on. Maintainers should also keep in touch with the “Guix Europe” non-profit registered in France, currently spearheaded by Manolis Ragkousis and Andreas Enge, and which has been providing financial support for hardware and events.
Keeping the build farm infrastructure up and running, extending it, thinking about hosting issues, etc.
Keeping the web site up-to-date.
Looking after people: making sure to promote people who are very involved in leadership position; dubbing new committers, new maintainers, new members of the spending committee. Supporting new initiatives. Generally trying to make sure everyone’s happy. :-)

With now five people on-board, we’ll probably be able to improve some of our processes and be able to scale better. You’re welcome to share your ideas on guix-devel@gnu.org or directly at guix-maintainers@gnu.org!

More generally, we think rotating responsibilities is a great way to bring new ideas and energy into the project. We are super happy and grateful that Maxim, Marius, and Tobias are taking on this challenge—thank you folks!

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.