Unmaintained charms

As a charm goes through its software life cycle it may become outdated if it is not maintained. Specifically, a charm may fail to deploy, relate, or execute defined configuration options.

When this happens we will follow the below process to determine next steps. We always strive to keep charms in the Charm Store as we value the work it takes to author a charm and pass review. Having a rich set of valuable charms is the primary mission of the Juju community.

The following process should be executed in order, and each point must be addressed, culminating with a bug report detailing the process taken to arrive at the conclusion of a charm being unmaintained.

Identifying charms that are unmaintained

  • Does the charm have any of the following conditions?
  • Fail charm proof, or lint
  • Fail unit, functional, or integration tests
  • Fail to deploy
  • Fail to relate to defined relations
  • Fail to respond to defined config options
  • Fail to properly go through the Juju life cycle (deploy, scale up/down, relation join/depart, destroy)
    • If a core hook is broken (install, config-changed, start, stop, upgrade-charm), is this fixable by the reviewer?
  • Automated Charm testing attempts to flag any policy issues. A FAIL in automated Charm testing is an indication the Charm is no longer following policy and should be considered to be moved out of the recommended status.

If any of the above conditions exist, follow the unmaintained charm process.

Unmaintained charm process

  1. Join the #juju channel on the Freenode.net IRC server and ask for help confirming your findings.
  2. Report a bug against the charm if there is not already one.
    • When filing a bug in Launchpad check the following:
    • Is the charm bug tracker completely barren?
    • How many bugs are there for this charm? (expired or current)
      • Are any of the bugs related to the problem you found?
    • Has the active maintainer triaged the bug filed?
    • Is there an active maintainer listed in the metadata.yaml file?
    • Attempt to contact the maintainer to address issues identified.
    • If no maintainer:
      • Create the bug against the charm with subject = “Maintainer needed”
      • Tag the bug with “maintainer-needed”
      • If you can address the failure, and there is no maintainer, please consider listing yourself as the maintainer.
  3. Email juju@lists.ubuntu.com for assistance in resolving the issue identified. This email is intended to let interested parties know the given charm is a candidate for removal from recommended status referencing critical bugs (bugs that cause the charm to fail policy).
  4. If a maintainer is needed, use the subject of "[maintainer-needed] - charm name"
  5. Reference the problem that is failing policy and thus should be considered for removal.
  6. List the number of bugs against this charm.
  7. List attempts to contact the maintainer.
  8. After 1 month of no responses to Juju email list or resolutions to the bug that cause the charm to fail policy, the charm should no longer be recommended. Contact a charmer to move the charm to unmaintained.

Consequences of unmaintained charms

Moving the charm to unmaintained means unpromulgation (no longer recommending) and moving the charm from lp:~charmers to lp:~unmaintained-charms.
Since it involves the charmers group, this process can only be done by a charmer.

Moving to unmaintained-charms affects the charm's listing as recommended, code reviews, automated charm testing for merge proposals, and deploy commands.

  • Unmaintained charms: juju deploy cs:~unmaintained-charms/<series>/<charm-name>
  • Recommended charms: juju deploy series/<charm-name>

Steps for charmers to take for unmaintained charms

  1. Verify the unmaintained process has been followed.
  2. Unpromuglate the charm.
  3. Put charm into “unmaintained-charms” branch
  4. Remove the current maintainer from metadata.yaml