I'm a little concerned about automatically labeling people as inactive. Currently we only monitor activity in Git commits. Specifically, the only means that we currently have to determine whether or not somebody is active is by having them listed as either the author or as an "also-by" on Git commits. We don't track, for example, whether or not somebody is helpful in reviewing/merging pull/merge/review requests or is actively helping contributors in mailing lists (or wherever). IMHO, we need to have access to better metrics before we can make any sort of judgement about whether or not a committer is active.
That's true. Maybe the "inactive" term is too negative and imprecise. What really matters for committers are code changes, so a label could say "no code change for ...".
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I have mixed feelings about whether or not it makes any sense to be a committer if you don't need the superpowers that come with being a committer. That is, I want to be careful about how we approach removing committer status from people just because they don't need it. One can, for example, be super useful in a mailing list without having committer status; if that's the only (super valuable) thing that an individual does, do they need to be a committer? Is being a committer as status actually valuable?
I'm personally supporting the idea that being a committer on a project should really be about code contributions (ie authoring and merging patches). I agree there is no point in assuming someone who's doing some counsel on the developer mailing-list doesn't need to have a committer privilege.
However, it seems also important to highlight that reviews or other code contributions that wouldn't appear in Git metadata can also be good matter to nominate someone as a committer, so for example people who've been participating the PR reviews can be nominated as committers on that criterion, since they're likely to merge patches in the future.
I really like the idea of a periodic message from the system to the mailing list that at least reminds the team that they have an obligation to keep their committer list current.
I'm happy to read that!
