In late 2012 we tried an experiment where folks volunteered to act as stewards of particular functional areas. The basic idea was we'd require scrutiny from more folks if we didn't have anyone available who had self selected as familiar available at the time of review.
Described like this in the ref guide currently ---- h3. Patch +1 Policy The below policy is something we put in place 09/2012. It is a suggested policy rather than a hard requirement. We want to try it first to see if it works before we cast it in stone. Apache HBase is made of components. Components have one or more OWNERs. See the 'Description' field on the components JIRA page for who the current owners are by component. Patches that fit within the scope of a single Apache HBase component require, at least, a +1 by one of the component’s owners before commit. If owners are absent — busy or otherwise — two +1s by non-owners will suffice. Patches that span components need at least two +1s before they can be committed, preferably +1s by owners of components touched by the x-component patch (TODO: This needs tightening up but I think fine for first pass). Any -1 on a patch by anyone vetoes a patch; it cannot be committed until the justification for the -1 is addressed. h3. Component Owner/Lieutenant Component owners are listed in the description field on this Apache HBase JIRA components page. The owners are listed in the 'Description' field rather than in the 'Component Lead' field because the latter only allows us list one individual whereas it is encouraged that components have multiple owners. Owners or component lieutenants are volunteers who are (usually, but not necessarily) expert in their component domain and may have an agenda on how they think their Apache HBase component should evolve. Owners will try and review patches that land within their component’s scope. If applicable, if an owner has an agenda, they will publish their goals or the design toward which they are driving their component If you would like to be volunteer as a component owner, just write the dev list and we’ll sign you up. Owners do not need to be committers. ---- This was still around enough when I joined the project in ~2014 one of the things I did was sign up for a few. I would be surprised if anyone with < 1 year in the project (a) knows about this approach or (b) what areas (as defined by this effort) specifically to reach out to me about. I certainly haven't updated the list for which ones I feel most comfortable talking about now that I've been here a bit. Should we drop this effort? Seems counter to several of our community trends; it adds one more thing to maintain, discourages sense of shared ownership, requires even more reviewer bandwidth that we don't have. Or should we revitalize it? Would provide a better idea of our "reviewer coverage" and give easier pointers for e.g. folks looking for mentorship on learning about particular parts of our HBase.
