Re: Owner for Commit Access Policy

[Gervase Markham]

On 04/08/16 16:22, Hal Wine wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 1:48 AM, Gervase Markham  > wrote:
> 
> I had a few abortive goes at this a few years ago; it's an enormous
> effort to get everyone on the same bandwagon, and just leads to the
> creation of bureaucracy for no value. Let's not try it again. 
> 
> Actually, there are some modern attempts at this - times have changed.

I'm not sure any of the things you name amount to an attempt to write a
single policy for all Mozilla repos governing who can check in or not; I
accept that there have been more scope-limited efforts, of course.

> But I
> agree with you that having a formal policy for Firefox, and any repos
> which are upstream of it, makes sense. Knowing who can check in to a
> codebase which gets shipped to hundreds of millions of people is a good
> idea.
> 
> Since key upstream repos are now on GitHub (e.g Rust), this really means
> we need a plan that covers GitHub, imo.

A very fair point. (Although it need not cover all of our Github.)

> As is often the case, these "nice to haves" are "underfunded mandates"
> until something happens. There are a few of us who keep trying to push
> the rock up the hill in between the events that get everyone's attention.

:-) It's one of those "buying insurance" things - if we don't do this,
perhaps nothing bad will happen, but perhaps something will, and it'll
be much worse for not having done it.

Gerv

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Re: Owner for Commit Access Policy

[Gervase Markham]

On 04/08/16 06:06, Gregory Szorc wrote:
> 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.

I don't think that's contentious; I think it's a totally accurate
assessment :-)

> The reality of today is that the "Mozilla Commit Access Policy" is
> effectively the "Firefox Commit Access Policy."

Yep. And we should probably rename it as such.

> 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 had a few abortive goes at this a few years ago; it's an enormous
effort to get everyone on the same bandwagon, and just leads to the
creation of bureaucracy for no value. Let's not try it again. But I
agree with you that having a formal policy for Firefox, and any repos
which are upstream of it, makes sense. Knowing who can check in to a
codebase which gets shipped to hundreds of millions of people is a good
idea.

Gerv

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Owner for Commit Access Policy

[Mitchell Baker]

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/



Mitchell
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