Pm2: critique on the pace of maintenance

[tjwebb]

@Unitech I think you've got a great idea here, but I think the number of people using this module and filing issues is out-running the pace of maintenance and improvement. I use pm2 for one of my projects but am now running into many of the same issues that others have filed, and it's difficult to have faith in the project when so many important issues are not being addressed.

I'm a user at a crossroads: pm2 is extremely useful, but we are now considering switching to another tool because bugs are introduced at roughly the same rate they are fixed, and we're having to spend a lot of effort working around all the issues that are outstanding. All projects will have issues that cause inconvenience, but many of the outstanding issues here are serious, especially considering that the primary use for pm2 is to monitor and maintain live systems.

I'd like to see more maintainers brought into this project, since maybe the project is now more popular than you alone can manage. I congratulate you on your success, but in order for us to rely on pm2 in the long term, I really would like to see more velocity in resolving some of these issues, so I propose that you choose one or two folks from the existing community of users and/or contributors to add as collaborators to this project.

Perhaps in the comments here, people can nominate themselves or others to take on this responsibility. Let me know what you think. Thanks, and great work.

[soyuka]

Hi @tjwebb,

I'm aware, and so is @Unitech, that there are a lot of issues. As the repository becomes more and more popular there are 3-4 issues per day.
I contribute as much as I can but I got a busy-job-family-life, and still trying to do my best to contribute and resolve issues.
Also, many of popular repositories have a lot of issues, take nodejs or previously [email protected] had thousands of issues that were brutally closed with [email protected] (could find a lot of other examples here). My point is that we're trying our best but we are both very busy.

What is your issue? I understand your point but instead of criticizing please contribute or help us!
+1 to see more maintainers but those are hard times for everyone, we can't afford paying people to help with this project ^^.

[tjwebb]

Yea like I said, I understand that you guys are probably busy, which is why I suggested trying to tap someone else to join you. Tons of open issues is great if those issues are suggestions and feature requests, but many of these are bugs or security holes. If this sounds critical, it's only because I want to shine a light on the problem in the hopes of solving it in order to make this project stronger.

we can't afford paying people to help with this project ^^.

Hopefully your monitoring service will take off soon. How's that going, anyway?

Adding another maintainer, even if just to help categorize and prioritize the outstanding issues, would be a huge benefit. It's difficult to tell when certain issues are going to be resolved, if at all, if they are in progress, etc. I don't want to start working on something that someone else is already working on, for example, or that I think might never get pulled in. I'd be happy to help screen and label issues, for example, since I think having a clearer roadmap will encourage more contributions from others.

[ravi]

How about this (a request, not a challenge :-)): point me to one bug/security issue and I'll see if I can fix it and send in a pull request. If I feel I cannot, then I'll ask for another. I say this because just looking through the issue list doesn't help me. There are a lot of issues filed as if they are bugs, but really translate to a request for help (e.g: someone I think has reported that they cannot run a Python script using PM2. We know that generally speaking that is possible. So this person actually has a particular use case that may be a pilot error, or could point to a bug specific to his case).

[soyuka]

I think the bigger problem, speaking generally, they are of course exceptions, is that user's are reporting issues concerning a really specific task, without giving any help to reproduce or any use cases.
Every day in the morning I take a quick look at issues there and try to pick one randomly and I won't be able to point you in a specific direction for the time beeing.
A good start would be working on:

• better labels (to help prioritize important issues for example - it'd also help nice people like @ravi to find an issue to fix (: )
• README section on "How to write an issue"

A better-written issue'll have a quicker fix (by quick I mean fast) but it must have as many informations as the user can get and required informations: node version, pm2 version, operating system etc.

What are your thoughts about this?

[ravi]

Agreed with all that @soyuka writes above.

[soyuka]

https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues?page=3&state=open

Better like this right?

@ravi #300 seems pretty easy to resolve, or take a look a the need-pr issues.

[Unitech]

@tjwebb I hope you've seen some progress since you wrote your message :) We are now a team of multiple developers and we're proud to maintain PM2 open source and our premium versions. Hope you continued to use PM2!