[desktop-discuss] Request and policy proposal re: contributor status

[Brian Nitz]

Glynn Foster wrote:
> Hey,
>
> Laszlo (Laca) Peter wrote:
>   
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> Sorry about the delay, I'm in the middle of travels.
>> You are definitely an important contributor of the desktop 
>> community, in particular your blogging and spreading the word
>> about the build tools used in this community.  I think there's
>> a bit of an issue, though, with granting [core] contributor
>> status based on spec-files-extra contributions.  SFE is not an
>> opensolaris project at all, although it's clear that it's closely
>> related to the desktop community.  There's also pkgbase, but
>> it has not really taken off (yet ;) and it's not even endorsed by
>> the desktop community.  (I'd like to see that happen, btw).
>>     
>
> I've gone ahead and added a few more endorsed projects that relate to various
> initiatives within the desktop space - if anyone has more suggestions of what
> projects we should endorse, don't hesitate to shout out.
>
>   
>> Talking about spec file contributions in general, I personally
>> don't think it makes sense to pick any number for a limit
>> to become a core contributor.  For example, Sun employees who
>> are part of the desktop group have lots of spec files, but
>> I wouldn't give them core contributor status if they don't
>> participate in any community discussions.  Maybe not even
>> contributor status.  Actually, I don't think we need any
>> rules for this, it's a case by case thing.
>>
>> BTW, you missed 2 core contributors: Erwann Chenede and Doug
>> Scott were elected just after the OGB elections.  I guess
>> it should have been announced on this list, sorry about that.
>>
>> Anyway, that's my opinion, what do other core contributors think?
>>     
>
> I think generally we need to figure out some sort of defined ladder that allows
> people to get contributor or core contributor status - it needs to be a little
> more defined than gut instinct somehow.
>   

I would hope that the ladder eventually has a rung for those whose 
contributions fall into categories such as documentation, Q/A, 
distribution creation, discussions and porting (e.g. spec-files-extra 
contributors) which mightn't necessarily appear as spec-files 
contributors at all.  If we only allow coders to be contributors, we 
might end up discouraging these other kinds of contributions.  I 
understand that this becomes much more difficult to measure.  I also 
understand that we don't want thousands of Sun employees to dilute the 
contributor and core contributor categories because they've all 
contributed in some way.

> Maybe something like a non-trivial contribution gets contributor status, and
> continued contributions of the period of, say, 6-12 months gets core-contributor
> status. We'd probably need some sort of membership working group to admin some
> of this. We're way ahead of a lot of other community groups in wanting to figure
> this out.
>
> FWIW, I think Eric's definitely done enough to get contributor status - though
> I'd like to get an idea of where we put core-contributor status on that scale, a
> little bit more before we go granting anything more.
>
>
> Glynn
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