Maintainers

OpenXT is comprised of a relatively large number of git repos. Our goal is for each repo to track the relevant maintainers in a MAINTAINERS file in the root of the repo. This is pretty standard practice in OSS projects AFAIK. So if you're interested in knowing who maintains a specific repo in OpenXT just go to that repo and look at the MAINTAINERS file. If you're a maintainer of a repo, your repo should have a MAINTAINERS file in it's root. If it doesn't, please make one and put your details in it.

I doubt it will ever be necessary to have detailed MAINTAINERS files with section entries like they do for the Linux kernel but if you decide to partition your repo please pick a sane format. In the absence of another option I'd recommend using the format from the kernel but if other options exist please bring them up on the mailing list / google group.

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There has been a some discussion on the list w/r to project roles and responsibilities lately. Chris sent a writeup a while back and this is a draft attempt to get the github role of 'maintainer' documented. This is a draft under review.

Github teams

OpenXT is comprised of a collection of repos on Github. All repos are hosted under the OpenXT organization. Each subsystem of the OpenXT platform is generally maintained by a group of people and those with "push" or "commit" access to the repos are generally called "maintainers".

We collect related repos into groups called "teams". Users assigned to a team are typically referred to as members. Each subsystem has a maintainers team which usually isn't called 'maintainers': see the build team. This team and the expectations we have of the people in said role is pretty simple:

• Field pull requests in a "timely" fashion. Typically "a few days" is a reasonable turn around. Patches that require a lot of testing may take longer to turn around but please do get a response up at least noting that testing is under way. In the event of a failure to respond to pull requests within X days the owner of the request should send a message to the mailing list for triage.
• Merging pull requests while there's still open discussion either in github, the mailing list or JIRA must be avoided. In the event of disagreement, the maintainer has the authority to override the concerns of others but this authority should not be used in place of good communication. Maintainers should make a best effort to resolve issues raised. At the very least a maintainer must add a comment to the ongoing thread to document their decision.
• Make sure commit messages follow the OpenXT guidelines. If your subsystem requires special handling be sure it's documented in the guidelines document.
• You're a moderator and hold a position of power. Do what you can to resolve disputes but as a maintainer you make the final decision. Wield your power wisely (aka don't be a jerk) but remember that you were put in this position because the community trusts your judgement. In the event of disagreement among maintainers ... you'll have to sort it out among yourself.
• Discussion of conditions for removal from the role of maintainer? Hopefully it won't be necessary but it's a real possibility.

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