"Experimental" status and success criteria

[rvagg]

You'll note that this project is labelled "Experimental". That's because it can't exist as an unloved child of the Build WG, it needs to stand on its own; therefore it needs a community of maintainers. Currently only my name is on the README, but that needs to grow by adding people who are contributing fixes and improvements and not just issues for me to take care of. Ideally I could remove my name from the README because there's enthusiastic users who are maintaining it.

Unfortunately there are two layers here: contribution to this repo and maintenance of the actual server that it's currently running on. Since the repo is automatically deployed to the server there's hopefully not going to be a huge need for access to the server, but we'll have to figure out how to manage that divide and the security implications over time.

So, success criteria I think is that we have some meaningful signs of a sustainable maintenance community over the next few months. That timeline will have to be flexible in accordance with how much maintenance this project actually needs—if I'm spending a few hours a week on it then it's going to fail really quick, if I'm only having to think about it once a month then there's less pressure.

I think a community of maintainers has to come from the primary users of the binaries. Currently the obvious ones are the Docker community (docker-node probably) and maybe ARMv6 users.

[bertlea]

Thank you rvagg! It is a kind of good news to me as I am using Node.js on all my Raspberry Pi Zero-W. I just tried the v12.0.0 on one of my Pi Zero, and it runs fine so far. I think it is also important to the Raspberry Pi community. Because not only the Pi Zero/Zero-W runs on arm6, the distro: "Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac" (Debian) only got the 32-bit x86 currently. Unfortunately, my experience and technical skill limited what I can contribute to this. I will post something to the Raspberry Pi forum to make more people aware of this.