Add jdavies-st to votable, remove pllim

[pllim]

This pull request is to:

1. Add James Davies (not to be confused with Jdaviz) as a co-maintainer of astropy.io.votable. James has a long track record with STScI and Astropy, in addition to his current role in MPIA. Personally, I am very glad he is able to contribute more again.
   • Two-week comment period starts today and theoretically ends on 2026-10-13. Ref: https://groups.google.com/g/astropy-dev/c/RGpQHubqJyE
2. Remove myself as a co-maintainer of astropy.io.votable. I will still kinda maintain it under the "general maintenance" umbrella anyway, but I have not been involved in VO stuff for a long time and no longer actively maintain astroquery.vo_conesearch that uses it; therefore, I think it is time I call it here.
   • Does not need a comment period.

[pllim]

Linkcheck failure is transient and also unrelated.

[taldcroft]

👍 !!

[bsipocz]

The process should be to ask those who are actively develop and maintain a module first and maybe then invite newcomers to be maintainers (as James haven't yet contributed to votable, he is a newcomer -- if this about adding him as fits or table maintainer, and he is willing, that is a separate question as he has contributions in those modules).

So I am against this nomination, especially if it cannot be confirmed that Stelios, Manon, or Markus have been asked and they all declined the invitation. Alternatively, the list could also be defaulted to the pyvo maintainers; probably that would be the most appropriate as the module and package are very closely coupled (that list is kept up-to-date to include active people only and with good spread of host institutes).

Anyway, there is a trivial list of names with a very steady track record to start with, please use it instead of asking sideway questions and jokes as a way to recruit maintainers.

[jdavies-st]

Agree with @bsipocz that process is important. And I'm certainly happy to step back if other people who have a longer track record with votable would like to become maintainers instead.

I don't see this as a reward for anything, just a small way to become more involved. I'll keep contributing regardless. Either way this goes.

And no, I don't want to be a fits maintainer. Hi @saimn! 😅

[taldcroft]

It is a fair point that if any of the people @bsipocz mentioned are enthusiastic about taking on a maintainer role then that would make more sense. My interactions with @jdavies-st have been very good and that was the basis for my 👍 . I think that showing up for the job with a willingness to work is at least half the battle.

I was curious about astropy contributions for the maintainers that @bsipocz suggested so I got Claude to do some digging. It would seem that Manon and Stelios have been recently active in astropy votable and are good candidates to invite.

Merged astropy PRs: pyvo maintainers and related contributors

Person	GitHub	Listed pyvo maintainer?	Merged astropy PRs	Subpackages
James Davies	@jdavies-st	No	18	testing infrastructure (7), io.fits (5), io.misc (5, all ASDF), table (2), coordinates (1), cosmology (1), units (1), modeling (1), config (1)
Manon Marchand	@ManonMarchand	Yes	10	io.votable (4: 2023, 2025, 2025, 2026), coordinates (3), units (3), samp (2), table (2), io.ascii (2), unified-io (1)
Tom Donaldson	@tomdonaldson	Yes	5	io.votable (5: 2019, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2024), utils (1)
Stelios Voutsinas	@stvoutsin	No	5	io.votable (3: 2025, 2026, 2026), io.misc (1), samp (1)
Markus Demleitner	@msdemlei	Yes	3	io.votable (3: 2021, 2023, 2023)
Adrian Damian	@andamian	Yes	0	—
Thomas Boch	@tboch	No	0	—

Notes

• Counts are PRs merged into astropy/astropy, as of 2026-09-30.
• "Listed pyvo maintainer" means named in the
  Astropy affiliated packages registry; that
  entry was last reviewed in 2019. Brigitta Sipőcz, also listed, is left out of this table.

[bsipocz]

Not sure where Claude gets its "facts", but the list has been updated much since 2019, in fact there had to be at least two big overhaul. pyvo got moved under the astropy org in 2019, so that was an initial revamp but then e.g I wasn't officially maintaining it before I started at IPAC. And more recently we made a conscious/formalized extension just a few years ago after an ivoa interop.

What it also forgot to pick up on is that people on the list had reviewed a bunch of votable/vo related PRs here and downstream (which tend to be complicated) and have written or contributed to the standards themselves and were and are leading the relevant working groups etc. And various people on that list have expressed commitments/plans to near future contributions. Again, that may be made known if this was done as part of an actual process (something along the line you know "hey; maybe we need more votable maintainers, anyone has suggestions?") rather than an ad-hoc joke made on an issue.

Anyway, AIs mess of picking up the nuances is not the main issue here, but the process or the lack thereof. James would be very nice to have on board as an astropy maintainer but if it were me I would nominate him for table or fits, or in fact for generic maintenance and not on a module he has no history with either here or downstream.

[taldcroft]

What it also forgot to pick up on is that people on the list had reviewed a bunch of votable/vo related PRs here and downstream (which tend to be complicated) and have written or contributed to the standards themselves and were and are leading the relevant working groups etc.

No, Claude answered exactly the question I asked about contributions to astropy.io.votable. Your point about broader contributions to the world of VO are fine, but I was asking a narrower more easily answered question just to get a very rough sense of activity in astropy itself.

I don't know where it got the 2019 date but that is in weeds since the names are right.

@bsipocz - given your extremely strong opinions, deep understanding, and connections, can you take the lead in finding a new maintainer to replace @pllim ?

[pllim]

Adding James does not mean others cannot be added/removed, but each case should be handled separately with its own comment period.

I have contacted the following people separately for follow-up (and also discussing that is out of scope here): Thomas Boch, Manon Marchand, Stelios Voutsinas

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

[tboch]

Given my name has been mentioned in this thread, I want to add my 2 cents.

I have no issue acknowledging that my recent contributions to the VOTable package have been non-existent. I also have no issue stepping back and giving my seat to a maintainer with more time and energy to dedicate to the project.

[bsipocz]

@bsipocz - given your extremely strong opinions, deep understanding, and connections, can you take the lead in finding a new maintainer to replace @pllim ?

Going fwd, I would think it makes a lot of sense to make the pyvo maintainers the maintainers of io.votable as well as voparquet part of io.misc.

In fact we should have done it a while back as we were practically operating along those lines already.

[pllim]

I would think it makes a lot of sense to make the pyvo maintainers the maintainers of io.votable as well as voparquet part of io.misc

If you want to pursue this, please do open an issue at astropy-project because I am not sure if such cross-team arrangements are covered in https://github.com/astropy/astropy-project/blob/main/policies/adding-new-role-members.md