I think it would be helpful to non-committer contributors (and non-PMC committers (just me right now)) if PPMC members would muse a bit about what they believe the bar is for committership or PPMC membership.
I am not suggesting that the PPMC write a document with so much detail that you are hamstrung when looking at contributors in the future and decising if they did 6 hard code reviews and 5 medium or 7 hard code reviews and 4 medium ones. However, multiple people have pinged me asking how to become a committer, asking what work products are sufficient. I don't have a foolproof way of describing the possible bars, so let me give a few examples for feedback from the PPMC. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Potential committers: Alice started contributing 4 months ago. She fixes at least one style issue or typo every weekend. Bob started contributing a year ago. We uses Impala to organize his VHS collection, and he regularly reports scaling bugs as his collection grows to more and more impalad nodes. His reports are often out of date, since he runs an old Impala, but some are still bugs in the latest version. His bug reports are of very high quality. Carol started contributing six months ago. She helped design one tricky feature. It took her six months and 27 revisions to get the patch in. She also helps other users a lot with their issues. Dave has been contributing for 18 months. He helped design a tricky feature, too, but his code was not high quality enough to check in. He did document the feature while a PPMC member wrote the code. Since then, he's been helping users on the mailing lists and filing UI bugs, especially with the REPL. Eve used to contribute before Impala was with Apache, and she was not listed as a committer/PPMC member when incubation started. Since then, she does code reviews, only commenting on style issues. She does 3 or 4 a month. Frank has been contributing for three months. He writes 3-4 patches every weekend. They are all tests, query generation, or impala-shell.sh work, and they are almost uniformly high-quality. My personal feelings: Yes on Bob, Carol, Eve, and Frank. Alice is not on track. Dave is on track but should do more design work and doc writing. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Potential PPMC members, all of which are already committers. Gertrude has been a contributor for 18 months. She spends most of her efforts on backend performance in-the-small - a few microops saved per row per patch. She helps review patches in this area. She doesn't participate much on governance. Harold has been a contributor for a 30 months. He works exclusively on performance, but he writes very little code. All of his effort is devoted to understanding Impala performance issues, which he writes and and files as high quality bug reports. He does not review code and he does not write code or documentation. He participates in discussion and consensus-building on design. Imelda has been a contributor for 12 months. She also does not write code. She is focused only on community outreach, writing blog posts and doing the simplest code reviews for her recruits to the project. She posts or gets a new contributor once a month. Jules has been a contributor for 40 months. He only reviews code, but he gives outstanding reviews of both design and style. He managed two releases last year. Kim has been a contributor for 55 months. She used to write a lot of code but now she is focused on keeping infrastructure ship-shape, mainly flaky test fixing and Jenkins wrangling. She rarely votes. My personal feelings: No on Gertrude and Kim, yes on Harold, Imelda, and Jules. G+K may be outstanding committers and members, but are not on track for PPMC membership. However, they could get on track very easily by focusing some small part of their effort on governance work. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ BTW, if you don't know if you already are a PPMC member, here is the list: http://incubator.apache.org/projects/impala.html If you are a PPMC member, please subscribe to private@, where votes on committership and PPMC membership will be held. This general discussion should happen in public; private is for discussion of real people, not these fake names.
