There are trade-offs. On one side, a small group of "core" committers who understands the whole picture makes the project move swiftly and safely. On the other side, the reward of becoming committer is really important to encourage more contributors. I think Tianqi's proposal gives a good criterion of "core" committers. So I would like to see something like: (1) Easy to become a committer as a reward of your contribution. (2) Hard to be promoted as a "core" committer unless you're likely to contribute to the project for a longer-term. (Similar to Blizzard's game concept: "easy to learn and difficult to master" :) )
Anyhow, I am not sure Apache's management allows this or not. From my bare understanding, it seems to be quite flat and committer is the only viable title? Or could we make this an implicit rule? On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 8:04 AM, Isabel Drost-Fromm <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 04, 2017 at 12:27:16PM +0100, Chiyuan Zhang wrote: > > Suppose we lower the standard or completely remove the formal standard > for > > committers, then we could probably be able to get more committers from > the > > first type. But that might not necessarily be good to us > > Can you elaborate your reasoning here? (I'm not implying that I agree or > disagree with you, I just want to understand where this fear is coming > from.) > > > > having people that could either contribute relatively important > components > > or provide longer term commitment to the project. But on the other hand, > > having a standard for committers do not (I hope) discourage the first > type > > of contributors to contribute PRs. > > Let me tell you a little campfire story: Back in the old days of Mahout we > implicitly had a relatively high bar for becoming a committer. People > thought > that in order to become committer they would have to contribute substantial > patches, often full new algorithm implementations. > > What the project really needed were a lot of work polishing, optimising, > cleaning, making easier to use, documenting etc. > > Due to the perception of requiring substantial contributions to get the > reward of becoming committer however we never received much of the latter. > > > Lesson learnt for me: The way you setup your reward systems greatly > influences which kind of help your project will receive. > > > Isabel > > -- > Sorry for any typos: Mail was typed in vim, written in mutt, via ssh (most > likely involving some kind of mobile connection only.) > -- Minjie Wang *New York University | Computer Science* 715 Broadway, New York, NY, 10009
