[all] Committer criteria

[Henri Yandell <fl...@gmail.com>]

I've been pondering if our critieria for granting committership is out of date.

It used to be, in Jakarta, that a committer was the basic element of
our culture. We didn't have members and we didn't particularly have a
PMC. Becoming a committer meant that you were a part of the fabric,
you voted, you released projects - whatever. We were also very worried
about things going incorrectly into the version control system as it
was seen as distribution.

Things are a bit different now. To match the general ASF, voting is
only binding from members of the PMC - committers have as much of a
vote as users - ie) it's hopefully listened to but it's not binding.
Cliff, as ASF Legal VP, is far more concerned with things we actively
distribute than with the passive distribution of the version control
system. If something is messed up, we just have to fix it asap. Plus
the measure of what is messed up is lessened - we can have GPL jars in
our SVN and it wouldn't cause us legal grief until we packaged them up
in a distribution.

So, for people like Chris who are actively trying to get involved, are
we setting a bar that just causes us pain? I don't think there are any
social or legal issues that say we have to wait on people to submit a
bunch of patches, and who cares if we end up with yet more inactive
committers, each active committer will be worth 9 inactive ones.

Just thinking...and thus stirring the pot a bit because I can't help
but share...

Hen

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Re: [all] Committer criteria

[Henri Yandell <fl...@gmail.com>]

On 5/1/06, robert burrell donkin <ro...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 10:46 -0700, Henri Yandell wrote:
> > I've been pondering if our critieria for granting committership is out of date.
>
> i'm not sure that we really have any objective criteria: just a
> subjective tradition :)
>
> personally speaking, i will not nominate a new committer unless i am
> convinced that i have the time to provide oversight and help for as long
> as i think i can be of assistance.

Right, I think this is a pretty good limiting item of criteria.
Nomination implies official mentorship - much like the Google Summer
of Code. With a defined period.

ie) We might nominate Chris to work on compress for 2 months with
Mario mentoring - we would ask Mario for a report at the end of the 2
months.

> this is also a considerable
> investment of my energy so i need to be convinced that it will be worth
> it. this means i need to be able to form a judgement from a number of
> contributions. i prefer to wait until those contributions demonstrate an
> understand of the way that apache and jakarta works.

Personally I don't think anyone really knows how it works and we're
all just slowly picking things up on the moving target that is
macro-community consensus.

Jumping right in is the best way to pick up the understanding,
otherwise the 'way it works' becomes an understanding that someone has
to send in a few patches etc - not necessarily of value once they are
a committer. You could say that the

>
> i am very liberal in supporting karma for committers already at apache.

+1. Far as I'm concerned, I'll +1 anyone at Apache who wants commit
rights. I've been pondering an email on sandbox->proper promotions
suggesting it be more obvious that if you want to become a released
component, having 3 interested ASF committers is all it should take.

If Cocoon had a component they wanted to release here, and they had 3
committers interested in it, the fact none are members of Jakarta
would make no difference (I think...after a bit of community navel
gazing).


> > So, for people like Chris who are actively trying to get involved, are
> > we setting a bar that just causes us pain? I don't think there are any
> > social or legal issues that say we have to wait on people to submit a
> > bunch of patches, and who cares if we end up with yet more inactive
> > committers, each active committer will be worth 9 inactive ones.
>
> a few observations
>
> 1 infrastructure would definitely care: ATM every committer requires
> shell and a quantity of setup. both stress our limited volunteer
> infrastructure. hopefully this issue should go away sometime soon.

Agreed. I doubt we'd be increasing it dramatically though, we're but
one tiny (sub)project among many and we're not that active on adding
new committers currently.

> 2 it is very possible some members may have philosophical objections to
> committership being given away too freely. some other notable projects
> set high bars for committers.

I asked around on #asf about that prior to posting. Two reasons that
jumped up were legal and technical (see next question for legal).
Commons code is easy in many cases - and the components are nicely
decoupled, so I think the technical is not as big a deal here as it is
in some projects.

> 3 would this increase worries about oversight? allowing committers
> without a track record would need a lot more active supervision. it may
> just displace the issue. if there aren't enough people willing to patch
> the codebase, then are there going to be enough to supervise the
> codebase?

This is the bit I'd always assumed drove the need to limit the rate of
adoption. This is where the PMC and Cliff/SVN came in. The main time
that oversight is needed is on a release - which gets voted on by the
PMC. Monitoring every commit seemed less essential than it used to be.


Hen

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Re: [all] Committer criteria

[robert burrell donkin <ro...@blueyonder.co.uk>]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 10:46 -0700, Henri Yandell wrote:
> I've been pondering if our critieria for granting committership is out of date.

i'm not sure that we really have any objective criteria: just a
subjective tradition :)

personally speaking, i will not nominate a new committer unless i am
convinced that i have the time to provide oversight and help for as long
as i think i can be of assistance. this is also a considerable
investment of my energy so i need to be convinced that it will be worth
it. this means i need to be able to form a judgement from a number of
contributions. i prefer to wait until those contributions demonstrate an
understand of the way that apache and jakarta works.

i am very liberal in supporting karma for committers already at apache.

<snip>

> So, for people like Chris who are actively trying to get involved, are
> we setting a bar that just causes us pain? I don't think there are any
> social or legal issues that say we have to wait on people to submit a
> bunch of patches, and who cares if we end up with yet more inactive
> committers, each active committer will be worth 9 inactive ones.

a few observations

1 infrastructure would definitely care: ATM every committer requires
shell and a quantity of setup. both stress our limited volunteer
infrastructure. hopefully this issue should go away sometime soon. 

2 it is very possible some members may have philosophical objections to
committership being given away too freely. some other notable projects
set high bars for committers. 

3 would this increase worries about oversight? allowing committers
without a track record would need a lot more active supervision. it may
just displace the issue. if there aren't enough people willing to patch
the codebase, then are there going to be enough to supervise the
codebase? 

- robert



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