Re: Subject: CFV: New JDK 10 Committer: Erik Österlund

[jesper.wilhelmsson at oracle.com]

> On 22 Jun 2017, at 19:02, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> 
> 2017/6/22 11:26:16 +0200, thomas.schatzl at oracle.com:
>> Vote: veto
>> 
>> Justification:
>> 
>> I looked through the changes and I do not believe they meet the
>> (informal?) goal of having eight significant commits.
>> 
>> ...
>> 
>> I do know Erik, and I know that he is trustworthy to be committer, and
>> I know that he has lots of good changes about to be committed, but in
>> addition to this understanding some formal requirements must be met (or
>> at least very close to) at the time of nomination.
>> 
>> This is, in my view not the case here at this time.
> 
> The "eight significant contributions" threshold is not a hard-and-fast
> rule -- it's just a rough guideline, as stated [1].
> 
> The key question to answer when someone is nominated to a Committer role
> is: Do you trust them to use their push access in a responsible fashion?

If this is the key question then this question should be stated in the rules and the eight commits part should be removed.

> If someone has contributed eight significant changesets then chances are
> pretty good that they've learned how things work, what to watch out for,
> and when to ask for help, and so they can be trusted with push access.

The number of changesets pushed by someone says nothing about what the person has learned about how to work with the codebase and / or the infrastructure around it. We have seen several cases where developers has worked in sandboxes developing large new features and doing a large number of commits in that sandbox. These developers have learned the all they need to know to become Reviewers before they contribute their first change to the OpenJDK. Once the new feature is pushed they get one single commit to show for all that work. We have also seen developers that has contributed 10+ small patches in a limited area of the source base. They have never done a single "hg commit" but have simply sent a diff to someone who is to shepherd the change. These developers will have 10+ changes but should probably not be considered for a Committer role.

> If someone hasn't yet contributed eight significant changesets then that
> doesn't mean that they're not qualified to be a Committer.  If they've
> demonstrated in other ways that they have the requisite knowledge,
> skills, and judgement then a smaller number of contributions should not
> be a barrier.

There is nothing in the current text that supports that kind of translation from complex work to lower number of commits.

I propose to replace the old text:

"As a rough guide, a Contributor should make at least eight significant contributions to that Project before being nominated."

With something like:

"A Contributor who is trusted to use their push access in a responsible fashion and who has shown through previous work in the Project to understand the workflow and infrastructure required to work in the Project can be nominated."

When the text on the OpenJDK page [1] has been changed to something similar to this I'll be happy to change my vote to Yes.

Thanks,
/Jesper


> 
> Speaking for myself, I've seen enough of Erik's work that I think he can
> be trusted, so I'm going to vote "yes".
> 
> - Mark
> 
> 
> [1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/#project-committer