Hi,

I would love to be able to give people partiial access to projects and I would 
also love to expire accounts if they are dormant or the person goes MIA.

For instance the first one would be especially useful in projects like ant, 
excalibur and commons. Many times in ant the committers have wanted to give a 
person access to a certain subtree in CVS because they contributed it and 
would be able to maintain it. ie Originally the Perforce tasks in Ant were 
largely contributed by a single individual and it would have been great if 
that person coul ddirectly maintain them.

However given that every new committer needs a new account on the boxen we 
never moved forward on it. When more appropriate infrastructure is put in 
place (Subversion - rah rah rah! Subversion - rah rah rah!) I think it would 
definetly be a good idea to do that. However that may put too big a burden on 
the system admins. 

When the new infrastructure is in place (think subversion, eyebrowse, scarab, 
+ some mailing list management software + some product release software) it 
would be very beneficial to push the administration down onto project "leads" 
and away from sys admins (who are prolly overloaded anyways). No one besides 
a select few would even need accounts.

Of course this needs a lot of volunteers to get started but until then I am 
not sure it would be possible to please everyone. However when thats in place 
all projects effectively manage themselves as they see fit.

On Sat, 25 May 2002 09:06, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
> Chatted with a lot of people, seen many, different development models, went
> around, asked, talked, and I believe I have a pretty decent picture, and
> maybe even a solution...
>
> So the major topic of discussion is that I perceive a substantial
> difference between being able to commit code to a CVS repository, and being
> a "committer" committer, with all dues and responsibilities that this role
> concerns...
>
> For example sometimes someone might want to have commit access just because
> he is working for a company that deals with a particular project in Apache
> (we've seen this happening several times with some projects such as Xerces
> and Tomcat), but he really doesn't care about the whole fuzz of Apache and
> stuff, and once the employment contract ends, the relationship with Apache
> terminates as well (I don't need to enumerate all those examples along
> those lines).
>
> One other example, if we didn't have Henri building RPMs for basically all
> Jakarta projects (and others), or if Henri wasn't a committer on Tomcat,
> don't you think that he would deserve committer status even if he's not
> tied to any particular codebase? We had this "problem" in the current
> election of the members, Sally Khudairi: Sally doesn't code, but she was
> involved with the ASF since before it was even created as a press
> organizer. Does she deserve to be a member of the foundation? Even if she
> doesn't code? Yes she does, IMO (and she was elected and nominated a member
> today)...
>
> So, IMO, there's a great difference between being a coder, and being a
> member of the Jakarta community, at least in my opinion. There might be
> coders who are not involved with the community, and there might be
> non-coders who are much involved with it, want to participate, are active
> and deserve to be committers...
>
> Our current structure doesn't "allow" that to happen, both things. If you
> need to write code in a particular source-base, and you need CVS access,
> you are automagically made a committer, even if you don't care about much
> else, and if you're very much involved with the overall project, but not
> tied to ANY whatsoever codebase, and really, don't want / can't do it.
>
> So, given this little background, I would like to ask to the PMC, and all
> other committers, if others agree that we should "splitting" the
> "committer" figure in two parts:
>
> - contributor: a contributor is someone who has access to a particular CVS
> tree, but for any reason doesn't want/need to be involved with the whole
> Jakarta community. He just wants to code his little bit and live a long
> life.
>
> - member: is someone who is involved with the Jakarta community, somehow,
> somewhere (might be just giving a great deal in supporting users of our
> projects, or providing extra value to projects, like guidance in respect to
> overall specifications, binary builds). He is effectively a member of the
> community and has all the rights and dues of every member, such as
> participate in the election of the PMC.
>
> And redefining the figure of the "committer" as follows:
>
> - committer: is a contributor, but also a member, therefore he has all the
> privileges and dues of a contributor (having CVS access, and overlooking
> the code he's contributing to) and of a member (can vote for PMCs, should
> participate and contribute to discussions on the overall structure of
> Jakarta).
>
> I believe this makes sense, more sense than what we have now, also because
> we've seen that happening in the ASF for the very first time with a
> non-coding member. Comments please?
>
>     Pier

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald


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