[Xen-devel] Konrad R Wilk's Xen Project Committer Status confirmed (+ some governance policy concerns)

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth.xen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I wanted to to summarize the outcome of the vote for Konrad's committer status. We had 4 votes in favor and one abstained. Which means Konrad is confirmed.

A number of concerns were raised, e.g. shouldn't other maintainers (e.g. George Dunlap as past release manager, or Stefano Stabellini) also be nominated as a committer. This could be relatively easily fixed, but requires one of the other committers to make a nomination.Â

Concerns about the definition of the committer role were raised. In summary, the governance policy today defines the committer role purely in terms of a maintainer with write access. However the role is actually also about being entrusted with the safety, governance and the stewardship of the project. This is implied in the governance document, but not spelled out.

Tim Deegan, described the issue quite well:

"It's clear from the governance document that the committers are expected to resolve disagreements that the maintainers and contributors can't sort out between themselves. Â

So maybe we should have a discussion about separating the roles of committer-with-tree-access and committer-for-governance? For me, the set of people who should be settling disputes is a subset of the set of people I would trust with push access to xen.git. IOW I'm a little wary of creating a group of people who make technical decisions but aren't themselves technical."

This concern does not apply to Konrad, who has excellent standing in the community and has been actively involved in design, development and review inside the hypervisor.

We don't need to resolve this issue before the 4.5 release. I think we should roll this up with a general review of our governance in spring. When I wrote up the contributor training document (see http://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/xen-project-contributor-training-part-2-processes-and-conventions-v10), it became clear that there are a number of conventions that are not well documented. These don't necessarily need to be part of the governance, but the governance document should probably link to some of our conventions.

Best Regards

Lars

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