Should we use the council members doc page in lieu of the maintainers list in lab readme

[fcollonval]

Curious if we should continue maintaining this list in the JupyterLab repo? Or just link to https://jupyterlab-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/team.html, which already contains the current list of council members?

Less maintenance is always good. It raises three questions:

• is the council a superset of the maintainers?
• is it ok to link the coming new frontend council?
• what about the "emeritus"? - I guess that list could be published on the team-compass too.

Originally posted by @jtpio and @fcollonval in #15724 (comment)

[jtpio]

is the council a superset of the maintainers?

Do we need to keep a separate list of maintainers? What would make a council member a maintainer? Also this list was created before the new Jupyter governance. It's also not clear whether it applied to the jupyterlab repo only, or the whole jupyterlab related projects.

Or maybe this question is similar to the discussion about teams and who can make releases (currently a subset of the council members), in jupyterlab/frontends-team-compass#167?

Does someone reading the README need to know there is a separate list of maintainers? Maybe knowing the subproject is led by the JupyterLab council in general (following the Jupyter governance model) is enough?

is it ok to link the coming new frontend council?

Probably yes, this would link to the same JupyterLab team compass in the end, as this is the one that will be kept (as proposed in jupyter/governance#200). This can wait until the merge of the councils has happened.

what about the "emeritus"? - I guess that list could be published on the team-compass too.

Sounds good. And maybe also for council members that may go inactive in the future? Or maybe the automated check already handles that?

[krassowski]

I think that even after the merge of JupyterLab and Notebook there is a potential value in having an explicit list of maintainers (with their GitHub usernames) for Lab and Notebook separately, so that new contributors know who to reach out. I think it should live in the team-compass repo (possibly be populated from a script) and linked from the main JupyterLab readme. I also agree we can postpone this discussion to until the merge is compelte.