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Hi Wayne,
Thanks for the follow-up. This is a bit of an unusual case. I'll describe the situation for you, and perhaps you can suggest a way forward.
Allen just started in his role at JHU last week, so he's really just been coming up to speed on the project in that time. Given that he's a project manager and not a developer, he won't be creating code PRs. He may create documentation PRs at some point, but
that won't be his primary role and it's not something I see him doing soon. Allen's background has primarily been in the corporate and government world, so there's not a record of work on open source projects to which we can point. I agree that this would
normally suggest the need to wait on a committer nomination, but I moved forward with it because our current project manager will be leaving the team next week and Allen will be picking up her duties. A big part of these duties is managing tickets and the
project board in GitHub Issues, which requires repo write permission, at least for the "main" repo (where all tickets are captured).
I'm anticipating that Allen's primary team contributions will be visible in defining and organizing work tasks for the team, but it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that he can't demonstrate this value unless he has access to the tools to do so.
What do you think is the right next step here? A couple potential options I see are (1) Grant provisional committer status, that gets reviewed after some amount of time or (2) Grant write access to only the "main" repo in the eclipse-pass GitHub org as an exception
for this case, then pursue committer status later. This may be a challenge due to the automation that is currently in place to handle granting permissions in GitHub.
From: pass-dev <pass-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of pass developer discussions via pass-dev <pass-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2022 2:08 PM
To: pass-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx <pass-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: pass developer discussions <pass-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>; technology-pmc PMC List <technology-pmc@xxxxxxxxxxx>; Eclipse Management Organization <emo@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [pass-dev] Committer Election for Allen Moore on Eclipse Public Access Submission System (PASS) has started
Sorry for the delay.
Is there literally nothing that Allen can do to demonstrate merit?
Has the nominee added value to discussions in any issues or other public communication channels? Are there options for the nominee to contribute to documentation? Is the nominee a subject matter expert with some public record that we can cite?
Wayne
On Fri, Sep 23, 2022 at 12:00 PM pass developer discussions via pass-dev < pass-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Wayne,
Thanks for reaching out and the pointer to the Eclipse committer guidelines. I've been involved with open source projects for many years and agree with you that the promotion to committer status is not one to be taken lightly.
The primary issue we're running into in Allen's case is due to limitations in both the GitHub tooling and the Eclipse process for assigning permissions in the GitHub context. Let me explain. Allen was hired to be the project manager on the Eclipse PASS team.
He won't be submitting PRs with code changes but will rather be managing tickets and the project board for the team, all of which is done using GitHub Issues and GitHub Projects [1] .
Due to the way permissions are defined in GitHub and the way they are assigned by Eclipse, it does not appear to be possible to effectively manage tickets and project boards without being a committer on the Eclipse project. I know this because we tried to
make this work for Cynthia York, who has been assisting with project management while we were looking to hire a full-time project manager. We started by adding Cynthia as a contributor [2] and found that this did not provide the access necessary to both create
tickets and add them to the project board. We have a single repository in the GitHub organization where all tickets and projects are managed, so I asked about granting her write permissions only on this single repo [3] but was told this could not be done due
to the way Eclipse currently manages permissions in GitHub. The only approach offered to grant the access needed was to make Cynthia a committer, so that was our final solution. I did follow up afterward to suggest allowing a Contributor to be given selective
write access [4] for this purpose, but given that this has seen no forward progress, it felt most appropriate to pursue the committer path for Allen.
In short, my interest in adding Allen as a committer is to allow him to perform his job function as project manager, which requires write access to issues and projects in GitHub . We attempted to set this up previously for Cynthia without providing committer
status but could discover no way to do so. If you have suggestions for how this can be accomplished, I would be happy to hear them.
best,
Bill
Greetings Eclipse PASS committers.
The foundational principles of the Eclipse Foundation Development Process are openness, transparency, and meritocracy.
With regard to the last one, meritocracy... the basic idea is that one earns responsibilities in a project via public demonstration. In the case of committer elections, the expectation is that the nominee will first demonstrate to the project team and
community that they understand their responsibilities and the various practices involved with being a committer before they are elected into the position.
The easiest way to demonstrate this merit is by making several high quality contributions to the project via pull requests to one of the project's Git repositories. There are other ways, but this is the most common means.
Frankly, if Allen is prepared to be a committer on the project, then Allen should be able to make a handful of contributions to the project via pull requests. With nine existing committers responding +1 to the nomination, I have to assume that at least
some of them should be prepared to accept pull requests.
Is there some existing public demonstration of merit that you can cite?
On behalf of the Eclipse Technology PMC,
Wayne
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Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects |
Eclipse Foundation
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Wayne Beaton
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Eclipse Foundation
My working day may not be your working day! Please don’t feel obliged
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