Adding committers to a project is a problem every project faces, and
there are quite a large number of ways to do it. I've been too
worried about legal issues (and they pop up often) lately, and this
is a good subject for us to resolve now.
We must
* have a visible process to ensure fairness
* a low barrier to entry to get people helping
* a rigid transparent process to ensure safety of the codebase in
terms of IP provenance
* a cultural standard through which people work on things that they
have demonstrated competence to the rest of the community.
For the last point, except for keeping people away from parts of the
subversion repository to which they have had prior exposure they
can't get resolved, we want to have one kind of committer. However,
it's clear that we all have different levels of talent in different
areas of technology. So a nice way to work - I think - is that
committers are added for work in a specific area on a trust basis,
and if they want to work in other areas, they engage with others
already working there and get informal approval to commit at will.
IOW, don't just go rummaging through code in which you have no
experience, but work with those that are. This is something that
I've heard work well in projects like Subversion, and we're trying it
in Geronimo to recognize that the barrier to entry varies by person
and technology they are interested in working on.
So I'd like to keep it really simple :
1) Anyone with a contribution that would belong in SVN can be
considered for commit status by the PMC (PPMC while in incubation).
This contribution can be anything - new code, a patch to existing
code, documentation, a change to the website, testing code or other
resources, etc. (Hopefully this gets people interested in harvesting
good docs from the WIKI, as that's worth commit status IMO)
2) If offered commit status by the PMC and accepted by the
individual, we will get an ACQ from the individual along with an ICLA
if not already on file with the ASF secretary. I'd ask that
individuals wait to do an ACQ until offered, as the ACQ will be
evolving over time as we learn, and I'd like to ask that a new
committer have the current version on file as of the date of them
being added as a commmitter.
3) The individual would be given free reign in the area to which they
contributed, and trusted to engage with the relevant part of the
community for other areas of our codebase/resourcebase.
Comments? If people agree to this, I'd like to add this to our
website as part of the project policy.
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr +1-203-665-6437
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
