Hi all,

I proposed ages ago to have a public process for people to gain
Subversion access - after a long wait, I'd like to propose the following
for feedback, based on the Subversion criteria. The next step is to
define modules & module maintainers, and to publish the initial list of
committers to the project. I'll add this to the wiki.

All comments are welcome.

Cheers,
Dave.

Openwengo commit access

There are two types of commit access: full and partial. Full means
anywhere in the tree, partial means only in that committer's specific
area(s) of expertise. The COMMITTERS file lists all committers, both
full and partial, and says the domains for each partial committer.

How full commit access is granted

After someone has successfully contributed a few non-trivial patches,
some full committer, usually whoever has reviewed and applied the
most patches from that contributor, proposes them for commit access.
This proposal is sent only to the other full committers -- the
ensuing discussion is private, so that everyone can feel comfortable
speaking their minds. Assuming there are no objections, the
contributor is granted commit access. The decision is made by
consensus; there are no formal rules governing the procedure, though
generally if someone strongly objects the access is not offered, or
is offered on a provisional basis.

The primary criterion for full commit access is good judgment.

You do not have to be a technical wizard, or demonstrate deep
knowledge of the entire codebase, to become a full committer. You
just need to know what you don't know. If your patches adhere to the
programming guidelines of the project, adhere to all the usual
unquantifiable rules of coding (code should be readable, robust,
maintainable, etc.), and respect the Hippocratic Principle of "first,
do no harm", then you will probably get commit access pretty quickly.

The size, complexity, and quantity of your patches do not matter as
much as the degree of care you show in avoiding bugs and minimizing
unnecessary impact on the rest of the code. Many full committers are
people who have not made major code contributions, but rather lots of
small, clean fixes, each of which was an unambiguous improvement to
the code. (Of course, this does not mean the project needs a bunch of
very trivial patches whose only purpose is to gain commit access;
knowing what's worth a patch post and what's not is part of showing
good judgement :-) .)

How partial commit access is granted

A full committer sponsors the partial committer. Usually this means
the full committer has applied several patches to the same area from
the proposed partial committer, and realizes things would be easier
if the person were just committing directly. Approval is not required
from the full committers; it is assumed that sponsors know what
they're doing and will watch the partial committer's first few
commits to make sure everything's going smoothly.

Patches submitted by a partial committer may be committed by that
committer even if they are outside that person's domain. This
requires approval (often expressed as a +1 vote) from at least one
full committer. In such a case, the approval should be noted in the
log message, like so:

Approved by: lundblad

The "obvious fix" rule

Any committer, whether full or partial, may commit fixes for obvious
typos, grammar mistakes, and formatting problems wherever they may be
— in the web pages, API documentation, code comments, commit
messages, etc. We rely on the committer's judgement to determine what
is "obvious"; if you're not sure, just ask.



-- 
Dave Neary
OpenWengo Community Development Manager
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: +33 9 51 13 46 45
Mob: +33 6 28 09 73 11
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