In some projects at the ASF, a PMC member can grant commit rights on a feature branch to a contributor with minimal overhead. When developing significant or pervasive features, collaboration across linked JIRAs can be difficult for the contributors to maintain and for reviewers to track. Since we already support this model of branched development for Hadoop committers, extending it to newer members of the community seems pretty natural.
Given that many of the major feature branches in 2.1 included at least one significant contributor without a write bit, this pattern is also common enough to adjust our bylaws. In one possible protocol, a PMC member can propose a set of contributors for a particular feature branch. If there is no NACK, then those people are given a commit bit on the branch. Other responsibilities for committers- such as reviewing patches, vetoing changes in trunk, etc.- do not apply. The protocol on the branch should not require explicit rules, but contributors should keep in mind that our bylaws also require 3 +1s to merge the branch back; creating a feature branch is not a promise to merge. One would also expect proposed branch committers to have already written some code as the base of the new branch. Thoughts? Modifications to the protocol? -C
