Today we held a meeting with the proposed agenda. The recap of the meeting is below and you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).
Weekly Updates
In the past seven days
- 246 tickets were opened
- 253 tickets were closed:
- 223 tickets were made live.
- 9 new Themes were made live.
- 214 Theme updates were made live.
- 0 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
- 30 tickets were not-approved.
- 0 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.
We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job 🎉
Theme Check – blocking common issues
The theme representatives got merge access to the Theme Check repo and @poena already started cleaning issues and adding lots of improvements.
We would like to invite experienced reviewers to help to point out the most common issues in the repo.
Also, input regarding the update of the severity of some checks is welcomed.
GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ review flow proposal
There was a proposal put in place to move reviews to GitHub.
Some interesting questions were raised during the meeting. There were some worry about this flow being too complicated to follow, and the GitHub being too complex to use. On the other hand, some said that they prefer GitHub for development and code review.
An issue that was mentioned was regarding forking the themes, especially if you have a theme in a GitHub repo already. This can be remedied using upstream remotes.
One concern was raised about jumps between the platforms (trac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and GitHub). The process seemed a bit complicated. But considering the current implementation, with some tutorials, this gap would be overcomed easily.
We would still need input from #meta team, to see how easy it is to implement this, the way it’s implemented on the core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. trac.
Removing the 7 Day limit for replies during a COVID-19 virus outbreak
Current situation with the coronavirus made the reps think about loosening the requirement of having authors and reviewers having to wait for 7 days to close a theme. Some authors and reviewers may not have good internet connection, or have to take care of their loved ones, so they cannot focus on reviewing and updating themes.
Reviewers don’t have to remain assigned to a ticket if the response is taking a long time.
For a period of one month we won’t close tickets for inactivity.
Open floor
Input regarding the GPL primer page.
@kjellr added a quick background: The community team drafted that up late last year. @poena had mentioned that many theme authors don’t totally understand the GPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples., and there’s no great resource to help them understand it in the context of themes. If we were to create one and/or adopt that existing one:
- What content should it include?
- What do theme authors need to know about the GPL?
Another issues that were mentioned by @joyously were:
- What is compatible?
- What needs a license?
- What is the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3?
- What to put in the readme?
One resource that we point the users is: 100% GPL Vetting Checklist.
@aristath pointed out the following:
GPL is not the only option, there’s also MIT which is quite popular. It depends on what we want to explain.
Do we want to explain to authors what the WordPress-Core license is, and what freedom they have with WP-Core?
Or do we want to help authors choose a license and understand what the pros/cons of each license are?
If we want the latter, then the GPL thing is of little importance, a multiple-questions survey thingy which would spit out the license at the end would be better suited.
It was decided that we should take these inputs as a good starting point for the discussion for the next meeting.
Another discussion was added from the announcement comment about multiple authors referencing the same brand. There was no conclusion, except that it could be misused the system to have multiple themes submit at the same time and get around the 1 theme rule. This could also be added as an agenda for the next meeting.
#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt
