On 19 November 2016 at 13:07, Berker Peksağ <berker.peksag@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree that we should look for people who wrote high quality patches, but I think we also should look for people who help other members of the community by doing *boring* tasks (e.g. review patches submitted by other contributors, triage old issues on the tracker, update an outdated patch by addressing review comments)
While I agree with this, I don't think it's an either/or situation - I know when I've recommended folks for commit rights in the past, it's been because the situation changed from "discussing their patches with me before I commit them is leading to important changes prior to merging" to "I'm mostly just rubberstamping their patches, and I trust them to ask me or another core dev for our perspective when they're unsure, and to take it with good grace if someone asks for a change they made to be reverted for further discussion". One of the luxuries of version control is that only released changes are hard to undo :)
One specific technique that has worked well in some cases is to explicitly scope a new committer's responsibilities (i.e. the "to work on X, Y, Z" comments in the developer log), rather than saying "feel free to approve changes anywhere in the code base". Branching out from that initial base (if they choose to do so) can then happen over time as they gain familiarity and confidence in more areas.
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia