Hi, On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Filip Maj <[email protected]> wrote: > Nothing you said implied anything like that, Ross. Rather, there was a > discussion that came up earlier on the private mailing list where a mentor > said that a potential committer coming in and being voted on inclusion > *needs* some manner of patch / code / documentation / anything contributed > to the project (or at least in the queue for inclusion) before being > allowed in. This essentially stopped someone's inclusion into the project > (first ever -1 vote!).
To elaborate a bit on that vote (I was the one who cast the -1), while contributions are a prerequisite for committership (Apache is a meritocracy) the exact amount and level of expected contributions is up to the (P)PMC to set. You could even decide that just joining the dev@ list and asking for committership shows enough committment to the project. The important bit here is that this level is applied equally to all contributors. At the time of the mentioned vote there were dozens of other contributors with more merit in terms of public contributions, but they hadn't yet been nominated for committership. This implies that there indeed is an implicit entry barrier even if it hasn't spelled out. Seeing that the nominee hadn't yet reached the level of contributions from other non-committers, the only reasonable vote IMHO was -1. > I would prefer we eliminate that requirement and simply rely on the > community's existing committers to use their vote responsibly. In general I agree with you here. There's always an aspect of subjective judgement when casting votes like this, and trying to reduce that to written rules is a futile effort. However, since there's at least the perception of an uneven entry barrier, I think it would be a good to clear up at least general outlines of what is expected from contributors before they'll be nominated for committership. The wiki page at http://wiki.apache.org/cordova/BecomingACommitter is a good starting point for that. See also http://community.apache.org/newcommitter.html for related Apache documentation and http://markmail.org/message/4nknqowil3yuw6tl for a recent general@incubator thread about this. BR, Jukka Zitting
