Hi folks, I've been chatting with folks off and on about this for a while, and was told that this made sense as a discussion on the dev@ list.
How does the PMC select folks for committership? The most common answer is that folks should 'act like a committer' but that's painfully nebulous and easy to get sidetracked onto other topics. The problem is compounded because what may be great on one project is inconsistently applied on other projects in the ASF, and yet we are all very tightly coupled as communities and as project dependencies. Ideally, this is something that we can document in the book. Misty gently pointed out http://hbase.apache.org/book.html#_guide_for_hbase_committers but also noted that it's for what happens after somebody becomes a committer. Still, if the standard is "act like one until you become one" then it's useful reading for people. Also, there doesn't seem to be any guidelines like this for PMC. Is the list of prerequisites possible to articulate, or will it always boil down to "intangibles?" Is there a concern that providing a checklist (perhaps a list of items necessary, but not sufficient) will lead to folks motivated wrongly, similar to oft maligned "resume driven development?" I'll kick off the discussion by saying that my personal yardstick of "Can I trust this person's judgement regarding code/reviews" is probably too vague to be useful, and even worse is impossible for others to apply. Curiously, Mike
