Proposal for change to repository governance

[Colin Clark]

Hi everyone,

It's exciting to see the Fluid community growing, with a number of new  
prospective committers getting involved. After talking with a number  
of community members about how we organize and govern our source code  
repository, I'd like to propose a change to our approach.

New members of the community are starting to explore deliverables that  
will be on the critical path for our Engage project as well as the  
Infusion product. At the moment, prospective committers are not given  
any commit access to the repository until they've gone through a  
process of submitting patches and earning the respect of the  
community. Overall, this process works well to ensure the quality of  
our code.

On the other hand, we want to foster increased collaboration and make  
newcomers feel welcome, giving them space to play even before they've  
earned committer status. To this end, I'd like to propose splitting  
our source code repository into three separate areas:

1. A space for our current, shipping products. This area will be fully  
governed by all the familiar coding and commit standards used so far  
to ensure quality in Fluid releases. Prospective committers will be  
nominated and voted on for access to this space as usual.

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Process+for+Granting+Commit+Access
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Coding+and+Commit+Standards

2. A space for incubated projects. This is a place for growing code  
that we expect to some day include in our releases. Anyone can ask for  
commit access to this space, and will be paired with a current  
committer as a mentor. Code reviews will be a requisite part of the   
incubation process, and we'll expect a growing standard of quality  
over time.

3. A scratch pad space. This area will provide anyone with a space to  
experiment and sketch in code. It is assumed that work here will  
either be entirely experimental or will be promoted to another space  
as soon as it has taken reasonable shape. No release deliverables  
should be worked on here.

Comments, suggestions, and refinements are much appreciated. After  
we've all had a chance to think about it and talk it through, I hope  
we can put it to a formal vote sometime next week.

Colin

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Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org