IPFS HTTP Client Libraries. Maintenance is here needed!

[daviddias]

The IPFS Client Libraries are a huge piece of the story in how users interact with IPFS and how IPFS interacts with multiple language communities.

Today, their maintenance is super ad-hoc and mostly based in volunteers writing a client library for their language of preference. It is actually kind of impressive to see the current list https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs#api-client-libraries

That said, most of these are today broken (lack of maintenance), they are integrated in the core devs workflow (testing them before release) and there is no way to notify those language communities that a new version has come out, "please update and give feedback".

Essentially, we need some{one, group} to own this. I've been thinking for a while and wondering if that would fall on the IPFS Community WG responsibilities for now, given other work being done for the JS libraries. Thoughts?

[mikeal]

I'm having a hard time figuring out what the expectations are here.

If the goal is to continue to shepard these projects along with "volunteers" but with a little more governance and some committers added based on recent activity, the Community WG can look at that.

If the goal is to have a central entity take on the maintenance burden of more than a dozen languages then I don't see how that's going to work. Not only do we not have the resources to accomplish this, centralizing the governance and decision making away from the projects themselves is likely to discourage the kinds of contributors we're getting now.

[daviddias]

If the goal is to continue to shepard these projects along with "volunteers" but with a little more governance and some committers added based on recent activity, the Community WG can look at that.

I believe that this is the way to go and the most valuable thing we can do as the next step.

[mikeal]

Ok, here's the plan:

• Improve https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs#http-client-libraries
  • Remove Completeness field
  • Add "Maintainers" field
• Create "client-maintainer" group in IPFS org
  • Ping each project to get a list of maintainers to add to the group
  • Let each project know about the newsletter so they can get any updates to their client libraries in

[daviddias]

• Improve https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs#http-client-libraries
  • Remove Completeness field
  • Add "Maintainers" field

👍🏽👍🏽

Also see the improvements made a few days ago ipfs/ipfs@b42a96d (super simple) and ipfs/ipfs#374

• Create "client-maintainer" group in IPFS org

Done and added you as a Maintainer so that you can add people https://github.com/orgs/ipfs/teams/ipfs-http-client-maintainer/members

• Ping each project to get a list of maintainers to add to the group

Can you take this action item?

• Let each project know about the newsletter so they can get any updates to their client libraries in

This is a great idea!!