On 28 Jun 2004, at 21:10, Cliff Schmidt wrote:
Simon Pepping wrote on Monday, June 28, 2004 1:01 PM:
On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 01:03:38PM +1000, Peter B. West wrote:FOP has recently voted in new committers who may have contributed too little yet (in the view of some) to already become committers. This was primarily due the fact that a lot of old FOP comitters became inactive during the last two years and some of the FOP committers wanted to help "reignite" the project. Although Batik seems to have similar problems, they haven't taken similar steps. If this is a problem for the Batik people, especially since the common components will be accessible to FOP as well as Batik committers, we'd like the Batik people to speak up.
I do not think that was the (only) reason to vote in certain committers despite the fact that they had not contributed much code. There is a gap between contributors and committers. There is no recognized role for possible team members who contribute in other ways than writing code, although we all know that such contributions are important for projects with an established user base. I think there is no such role in all of Apache; if there were, the role could be added to the charter.
I completely agree that people who aren't necessarily writing code make important contributions to a project, but why wouldn't they just be made committers at the appropriate time, in the same way the process works for people writing code. The role of being a committer shouldn't be limited to code decisions IMO. And people who contribute through docs, project management, release management, and other ways actually often need the same karma that code-writing folks do.
cliff's comments pretty well tally with my experience over in jakartaland. documentation is just as much source as the bits with brackets around and good documentation writers are harder to attract than good coders.
there are lots of people who contribute in many ways. people who answer questions on user lists are very important (to the health of a community) as are those on the development list who contribute to discussions but these don't have (or need) an official ASF status. but google knows and remembers :)
- robert
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