Lower the barrier for people contributing and maintaining engines

[Fabian Christ <ch...@googlemail.com>]

Hi,

I have recently read this interesting blog post [1] that describes the
social problem behind commit access in relation to the distributed version
control model that is used, e.g. by Github.

In Stanbol we have the situation that we encourage people to contribute
engines but once they were contributed the very same people should also be
able to maintain their engine. Otherwise we face the situation of
unmaintained engines where the original contributor is not available
anymore.

I was wondering if it would be a good idea and technically possible to give
people commit access to the enhancement-engines dir in the SVN if they just
ask for it. These people would not become PMC members this way. They just
get access to a sub path of the repo to contribute their engine. This way
they can keep on working on their engines easily.

WDYT?

[1] http://prng.blogspot.de/2009/02/commit-access-its-social-problem.html

-- 
Fabian
http://twitter.com/fctwitt

Re: Lower the barrier for people contributing and maintaining engines

[Fabian Christ <ch...@googlemail.com>]

2013/1/16 Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@apache.org>

> I'd suggest just being careful to
> vote people in early as committers so that they can work efficiently,
> and take our time before eventually making them PMC members.
>

+1 That sounds reasonable to me.



-- 
Fabian
http://twitter.com/fctwitt

Re: Lower the barrier for people contributing and maintaining engines

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@apache.org>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Fabian Christ
<ch...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> ...I was wondering if it would be a good idea and technically possible to give
> people commit access to the enhancement-engines dir in the SVN if they just
> ask for it. These people would not become PMC members this way. They just
> get access to a sub path of the repo to contribute their engine...

To make things simpler, we can also give those people full write
access to the svn repository, i.e. vote them in early but only as
committers, not PMC members right away.

And expect them to refrain from modifying code that they don't know,
except for trivial or obvious fixes - as we expect any committer to
behave. The standard Apache way of working (commit vetoes if needed,
etc.) is sufficient to prevent any serious problems IMO.

The subversion project has a similar "partial committer" concept
described at http://subversion.apache.org/docs/community-guide/roles.html
- as the Stanbol community is currently much smaller, I don't think we
even need to codify that right now, I'd suggest just being careful to
vote people in early as committers so that they can work efficiently,
and take our time before eventually making them PMC members.

-Bertrand