[xmlvm-users] Adding new committers

[Arno P. <ar...@pu...>]

Guys,

we had some internal discussions regarding the future of XMLVM from a 
project management perspective. Right now there are three core team 
members (Sascha, Wolfgang, and myself) who are the only ones to have 
commit rights. Contributors have to submit their patches to an online 
review system where the core team members review the patch and if 
accepted, commit it to the Subversion repository by mentioning the name 
of the contributor in the commit log. We have laid out the guidelines 
concerning coding conventions that can be found at: 
http://xmlvm.org/contribute/

We believe that in order to grow as a project, we need to be more 
flexible with regards to this process. In the long run the current model 
does not scale with regards to the amount of work.

We propose to introduce a new role within the XMLVM project: the role of 
a committer. A committer, just like the core team members, has commit 
rights to the Subversion repository. The core team can offer a 
contributor the role of committer if the contributor has proven 
him-/herself over a period of time to deliver high-quality patches that 
follow XMLVM coding conventions. A committer typically is responsible 
for a certain module within XMLVM. Within that module, the committer can 
make changes according to his or her discretion. If a change is 
necessary outside that module, the modification should be done by 
consulting the core team. As a good practice, major changes should be 
discussed on the mailing list anyways. If a committer repeatedly 
violates XMLVM coding conventions, the core team member can rescind the 
commit rights.

We would like to put these guidelines up for discussion on the mailing 
list. We believe that it will help grow XMLVM as well as acknowledge and 
recognize significant contributions by some developers.

The XMLVM Core Team