Nominating Mikael Gerdin to be an OpenJDK committer and a reviewer

[Bengt Rutisson]

Mark,

Thanks for taking the time to explain the details. I realize that we 
will not be able to create an OpenJDK user name for Mikael Gerdin any 
time soon, so I'll stop pushing for it.

Some comments inline.

[...]

> Aside from that, while I'm sure that Mikael is a very capable engineer he
> has no history of past code contributions in OpenJDK and thus there isn't
> a basis upon which existing Committers could judge his prior work when
> evaluating his nomination.

As I said, I will not push more for making an exception in this 
particular case. But in general I think that code contributions to the 
OpenJDK code base is just one way of judging someones capabilities. 
There are many other factors that can build trust among developers. For 
example, contributions and reviews to other projects such as JRockit, 
building tools or test frameworks around the OpenJDK base and just 
communicating around development issues -  helping colleagues out.

So, I definitely think that there will be cases where someone can be 
trusted to get reviewer status without having made very many 
contributions. It is important that there is a fast path to become a 
reviewer if we should be able to hire (and keep) experienced developers. 
They will not settle for being baby-sitted for too long.

[...]
> Unfortunately we do not, at the moment, have a great alternative in place
> and ready to go.  If you're anxious to push your changeset very soon then
> I suggest acknowledging Mikael in the "Summary" line of your changeset
> comment, something like this:
>
>      Summary: Also reviewed by mikael.gerdin at oracle.com
>
> A better solution might be to modify the jcheck extension to accept new
> lines of the form:
>
>      Also-reviewed-by: mikael.gerdin at oracle.com
>
> This is different from the existing "Reviewed-by" line in that it accepts
> an e-mail address rather than an OpenJDK username, and it doesn't carry
> the implication that the named individual has the formal Reviewer role.

Thanks for these suggestions. I like the "Also reviewd-by:" field, but 
it is not urgent for me to get that fixed in jcheck. I will use the 
"Summary: Also reviewed by" version when I push.

Just one comment on  the "Also reviewd-by:" field. It would be good if 
it would accept both email addresses and OpenJDK user names. Since there 
will be OpenJDK users that are committers but not reviewers. They will 
have their name and that feels like a better identifier.

> If you can wait a few days we can probably extend jcheck to do this, but
> we'd have to discuss such a proposal more widely a bit first.
>
> Thanks again for trying to follow the proposed Bylaws here, and sorry for
> all the confusion.  I hope this guidance helps.  We're already planning
> to write up a "how-to" document to help people understand and operate the
> processes defined in the Bylaws; hopefully that will make things more
> efficient for everyone once it's available.

Looking forward to the "how-to" document. That will be great to have.

Thanks,
Bengt

> - Mark
>
>
> [1] http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/bylaws/draft-openjdk-bylaws-10#_B
> [2] http://openjdk.java.net/guide/changePlanning.html