[General] Initial draft of committer policy

[Mitchell Kapor]

On Feb 16, 2006, at 6:21 PM, Ted Leung wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> We are getting to the point of needing to grant commit privileges  
> for some of the projects at OSAF.  This is a first cut  at  
> describing how the process should work for code committers.   In  
> the future we will probably extend this notion to design  
> contributors as well, but we are still trying to figure out what  
> that means.   What you see here is similar to the process used by  
> Apache and many other large open source projects.
>
> As usual questions, comments, critiques and other feedback are very  
> welcome.
>
> Ted
>
> ---------
> Participants in OSAF projects can take on a number of roles
>
> Users are people that use our software.  We hope that they will  
> contribute to the project they use by reporting bugs and making  
> erquests for features.  We also hope that they will become part of  
> the project community, by helping other users and telling other  
> people about our software
>
> Contributors are people who contribute to one ofthe projects via  
> design, code,  documentation, or testing.   Contributors are active  
> participants in the project mailing lists and provide design ideas,  
> code changes, or documentation changes.
>
> Code contributors may also become committers - They have write  
> access to the source code repository, and have signed a Contributor  
> License Agreement (CLA).
>
> * Becoming a committer
>
> If a code contributor has contributed a significant number of high- 
> quality patches, is interested in continuing to contribute to the  
> project, and has demonstrated the ability to work well with other  
> contributors, then an existing committer may propose granting that  
> contributor commit access.
>
> Discussion of a potential new committer will initially take place  
> in private (at the moment we have no private lists for this  
> purpose).  After this initial vetting discussion, the actual vote  
> can occur on the project's public developer list.  This practice of  
> a private discussion followed by a public, pro-forma vote is a <a  
> href="http://incubator.apache.org/learn/newcommitters.html">best  
> practice</a> adopted from the Apache Software Foundation.  Only  
> votes cast by existing committers are binding.

To have a fully-baked policy, I think we need more definition around  
the private "vetting" process.  Ted, can you say more about what this  
is like at Apache?

Also, I think the nature of the voting needs further explication.   
"Pro-forma" usually means in this context, for the sake of the form,  
i.e., something non-substantive.  Is this what you meant?  If not,  
can you say more about what it takes for a vote to "carry"?

>
> After the new committer has been voted in, they must sign a  
> Contributor License Agreement (CLA).  Once this document is on  
> file, the IT Staff at OSAF will create the necessary accounts, etc.
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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