...
As specified in the Technical Charter, a Contributor is anyone in the technical community that contributes code, documentation, or other technical artifacts to the Project. Contributors always have a voice and are welcome to provide thoughts and insights in any technical discussion within the project as well as assist in direct use and testing of the project artifacts. Examples of participation include but are not limited to:• Providing input/responses on the email list
• Contributing a bug fix via Gerrit
• Contributing code for a new feature via Gerrit
• Writing test cases or documentation
• Reviewing commits in Gerrit
• Integration/deployment testing of merged commits
• Triaging failed builds/deployments and runtime use cases
• Jira/Confluence authoring
• Contributing to weekly meetings and getting involved in assigned tasks
...
Committer
...
As specified in the Technical Charter, Committers are Contributors who have earned the ability to merge contributions (“commit”) source code, documentation or other technical artifacts in a project’s repository. A Contributor may become a Committer by a majority approval of the existing Committers. A Committer may be removed by a majority approval of the other Active Committers. Unless otherwise defined in TSC policies published on the Angel Web Site, “Active Committers” are Committers who have merged contributions in at least two separate instances over the last six months.
Since there may be multiple repositories per project, Committer rights are per repository. Being a Committer on one repository in a project does not necessarily or automatically grant that individual Committer rights on all the repositories in the same project. Likewise, having Committer rights in a project does not automatically grant that individual Committer rights in other projects.
Committers are the decision makers for a project – design, code, patches, and releases. Typical characteristics of a Committer include but are not limited to:
- Deep expertise in the code base over which they are Committers
- Time dedicated to reviewing code contributions made by other Contributors
- Demonstration of good judgment and mentoring of others in the gerrit process
- Knowledge and understanding of the overall development activities occurring within the project and its components; this is important so that the review of new code is taken in the context of the overall development for the project
- Knowledge and understanding of other, interdependent projects within the platform and how contributions to this project affect work being done elsewhere by others
The Committers on a project review each code contribution made by the Contributors and other Committers on the project. Often, a Committer will need to enter into a dialog with a Contributor to have them make changes to the contribution to better fit the functional, structural makeup, or style of the existing code base. It is preferable to have at least 2 Committers show approval (with a +1) for a contribution before it is accepted into the repository. Please note that it is very common for individuals to be a Committer on one project and a Contributor on another. However, there is nothing stopping an individual from being a Committer on multiple projects and repositories.
Committers are the best available individuals and usually work full-time on projects and components in active development.
In order to preserve meritocracy in selection of Committers while ensuring diversity of Committers, each initial project is encouraged to taking on at least two Committers from different companies (subject to meritocracy).