Description
...and I don't have a whole lot of time to donate to it.
Since I started it back in 2015, Paperless has grown far beyond what I ever expected it to be. With 5000+ stars on Github and a surprising popularity in Germany, issues are posted or commented on on an almost daily basis.
With the little time that I have (baby on the way!), I try to roll out fixes & features, but every change tends to add instabilities on platforms I don't personally use. There are people using this project on bare-metal Linux installs, Docker installs on Synology boxes, cloud installations, Rasberry Pis, and FreeBSD machines -- and that's only the ones I know about from issues users have posted.
If this project is going to survive & grow, there has to be more people driving it. Primarily, we need people who the rest of us can trust, but also people willing to do the boring work of adding tests and testing frameworks for the various platforms.
I'd like to transition Paperless to more of a collective effort, either as part of the @Jazzband, or some other means -- I'm open to suggestions. I'm happy to stay on to audit pull requests or make suggestions, but it's becoming clear that Paperless needs more from me than I'm able to give it, and so I'm thinking we need to expand the pool.
Here's what I'm suggesting: I believe GitHub can be configured to require that merges be reviewed by one or more other collaborators before code is merged. If I can figure out how to do this (maybe I need to create an organisation? Advice on this is appreciated.) then we could have a system where we have more people who can create & merge more stuff, but where merges require review from at least one other person -- that'll keep people honest.
If GitHub can't do this, then I'm also happy to move to GitLab unless there are strong objections.
IMHO, the first mission of this collective should be to get us to 100% test coverage and to update Travis (or something else?) to execute those tests in different environments (if possible). After that, I imagine some of you have your own priorities regarding where this should go. I'm excited to see what you have in mind.
I'm tagging a few people specifically who have been more heavily involved with Paperless than others just to give them a heads-up. If any of you lot are interested in taking a more primary role in this project, please comment below. Maybe we can get an idea of what kinds of resources/interest is out there. This is not an exclusive list, so if you don't appear here but feel you've contributed significantly (or just want to) it's because I didn't recognise your username from the autocomplete:
:+1: @Strubbl @philippeowagner @jat255 @ahyear @avichalp @BastianPoe @CkuT @ddddavidmartin @erikarvstedt @MasterofJOKers @pitkley @ovv
If no one steps up, nothing will change. That is to say, issues will continue to pop up and people from the community will (hopefully) try to help people with questions. I will try to keep on top of pull requests and chat in the issue queue when I have time, but as we've already seen, I don't have a lot of time.