On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 1:41 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > ...I might be staying the obvious, but to maximise Community involvement, you > probably want to build a baseline process around > contributors rather than committers...
I agree with that and it's also possible (if that's what the NetBeans PPMC wants) to give commit access to people "early", without waiting for them to demonstrate that they are ready to be elected as (P)PMC members. In Apache projects, committers don't have formal decision power, so they cannot do much harm - worst case if someone commits bad stuff that can be reverted, and if the problem persists their commit rights can be suspended. That's quite extreme, I've seen maybe two such cases in 17 years of Apache activity. What I mean is that the project doesn't have to be as cautious about electing committers as it has to be for PMC members, who can actually do harm and are harder to "fire". Many Apache projects elect committers early, even if they might not be qualified to commit to the project's core yet, stating that they are not expected to touch code that they don't fully master. You don't need complex access rights for that, social limitations are good enough and Git is your friend. This is for the PPMC to decide, but my suggestion would be to create additional repositories for experiments, plugins etc and set a relatively low barrier for electing committers who are meant to commit to those repositories only, in general, except for minor obvious fixes that might be committed to the core directly. -Bertrand (with my experienced Apache member hat on)
