Proposal to use maintainer instead of committer (commit access)

[Justin Obara]

I was reading through GitHub’s blog post on git 2.5. The new git worktree seems interesting and could be useful for some circumstances. However, what really caught my eye was the diagram of the triangular workflow (Upstream, Origin, Local). We’ve been employing this workflow for our repos since switching over to git. However, we’ve maintained a legacy, from our SVN days, of referring to individuals who merge as committers and having commit access. We’ve known this was incorrect terminology, everyone using git technically has commit access, but we didn’t really have a clear concept of what to call it. From the diagram, it appears that a more suitable terminology is maintainer.

I propose the following:

	Renaming:
committer -> maintainer
commit access -> push access
committers mailing  list -> maintainers mailing list (not sure if this will be too much work, we could leave this one as is)

	Updating Documentation as needed:

https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Process+for+Granting+Commit+Access
https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/List+of+Current+Fluid+Committers
		
	Cleaning up the list of current committers/maintainers:
		
		Move inactive committers/maintainers to the emeritus status ( to reduce confusion for contributors looking for mentors )


On the surface this may seem like a bike shed conversation about naming, but I feel that it is really more about using the correct terminology, reducing confusion, and continuing to use proper git idioms.


Thanks
Justin



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.idrc.ocad.ca/pipermail/fluid-work/attachments/20150730/ad7527f3/attachment.html>