Hi,
While thinking about how to get more contributors onboard, I identified that one bottleneck is building trust. Currently, a vote to promote a contributor as a core dev requires the approval of almost all active core developers, and this list is quite large (50 people? more?). It takes a lot of time until a contributor is known by enough people to start the process to promote them as a core dev.
My idea is to create subteams which would have less permission than "everything": restrict changes to specific directories. It seems like in practice, we already have such subteams: Documentation, IDLE and asyncio have a dedicated Component in the bug tracker, their own directories, a group of people focused on these components, and even... a dedicated mailing list!
The restriction would be the ability to merge a pull request. Since miss-ilington recently got the power of merging a PR, it makes me think that it's doable to allow "non core" people to merge a change under certain conditions. For example, let's say that a contributor called "Alice" is part of a subteam. If Alice approves a change in the review, added the "approved" label and the CI pass: a bot can merge the change, since Alice is allowed to merge a PR modifying specific directories.If Alice doesn't have the power, the bot may notice Alice that she lacks permission and the bot may remove the label.
IMHO it's better to have two steps to merge: approval in the review and a label, sometimes a change looks good but should not be merged yet, or you don't want to take the responsibility to merge it yourself.
What about current core developers? No change for them, they keep their "super power" to modify everything.
If a member of a subteam shows interest to do more than only working in a subteam, the usual promotion process with a vote on python-committers can be followed.
My expectation is that it will be faster to promote a contributor into a subteam. It's easier to trust someone if they is only allowed to modify some directories. In my experience, people with the same interest find their way to meet other people working on the same topic. The trust is built naturally in a component.
You may see a parallel with the Linux kernel hierarchy and Linux subsystems, but the proposed organization is different. In Python, the tradition is that everybody works in the same repository. I don't want to change that.
What do you think? Do you like the idea of subteams? Is it feasible (the label and the bot things)?
I identified 3 obvious subteams:
- Documentation
- IDLE
- asyncio
Maybe you see more candidates?
Victor