On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 8:20 PM, Mitchell Baker <[email protected]> wrote:

> ideal followup is governance ... cross posting to reach those likely to be
> interested
>
> I'm currently the owner of the Commit Access Policy module.  That's
> because I wrote the original policy and did what was necessary to get it
> implemented.  (That's old history!)  I was also engaged in the rewrite to
> the current policy but not at the same level. There's a separate module for
> implementation, owned by Marcia Knous.
>
> Someone closer to our code should own this policy going forward.  I have a
> few ideas but there are many people who have become active whom I don't yet
> know.  So if there's someone you think should own this policy please do let
> me know.  It should be someone familiar with how things work, who has a
> sense for good, workable practices that protect are code and a good
> communicator.
>
> current policy is here:
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/commit/access-policy/
>

I'm going to say something that might be a bit contentious: I think a
single commit access policy for all of Mozilla reflects the needs of
Mozilla from several years ago, not the needs of Mozilla today. The world
has changed. Mozilla has changed. The policy was written before distributed
version control was popular, before services like GitHub.

The reality of today is that the "Mozilla Commit Access Policy" is
effectively the "Firefox Commit Access Policy." There are large Mozilla
projects to which the existing policy does not apply or is simply ignored.
On GitHub, each organization or project has the freedom to define its own
policy. This is both good and bad. Mostly good for the flexibility and
convenience. Bad in that it has historically been the wild west and there
are some gotchas in GitHub's permissions model that can lead to access
being granted where it shouldn't be. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Github
for more on the policy that more or less governs the "mozilla" organization
on GitHub. Of course there are other Mozilla-affiliated organizations, like
Rust, Servo, Bugzilla, TaskCluster, ...

I'm not sure how formal we want to be on a commit policy that attempts to
govern all of Mozilla and/or that governs less established projects or
projects outside the Firefox umbrella.

I do believe that Firefox needs a formal policy. I consider security and
legal requirements as significant drivers of at least the Firefox commit
policy. So having someone with well-formed connections to those groups and
who knows the server maintainers would be ideal. I know Doug Turner has
expressed interest in the Firefox commit policy and his org runs the
Mozilla-hosted version control servers and Firefox automation. Ditto for
Lawrence Mandel and Jonathan Griffin. Hal Wine has done a lot of work on
establishing sanity to GitHub access, has familiarity with Firefox access
and security concerns, has access to the version control servers, and seems
to have connections throughout Mozilla. Those are the first names that jump
out to me. But I think choosing someone really depends on the scope of the
module/policy going forward...
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