CFV: New OpenJDK Members Group Member: Alex Kashchenko

[Dalibor Topic]

On 07.06.2020 19:00, Andrew Hughes wrote:

> I've withdrawn the Member vote. I wasn't aware the bar was quite so high
> for this, especially given that there are some Members without even
> authorship status.

Thank you for your understanding, Andrew.

> For example, https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8236996 shows Alex
> doing the backport work for 8u, 11u & 13u, but none of the resulting
> changesets credit him. This is fairly normal for backporting work.

I'd suggest pointing out the additional work he did in the CFV on the 
updates list. With the one above, that'd be three sponsored 
contributions, instead of 8. That's still less than half from what I'd 
usually expect to see from someone being proposed to be voted in as a 
Committer.
> Depriving Alex of committer status only serves to create more work for
> the rest of us, who then have to push his changesets on his behalf. It
> also effectively makes doing clean backport work pointless for him, as
> someone else then has to apply the fix, build and push it.

Yeah, I absolutely agree that being an Author is less convenient than 
being a Committer.

I suspect that some of the inconvenience involved in the distinction 
would disappear in the future for some Projects, with Skara providing 
the ability for Authors to /integrate /sponsored pull requests, per 
https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/SKARA/Pull+Request+Commands#PullRequestCommands-/integrate 
.

> I can see the point in not allowing commit status if someone is deemed
> untrustworthy, but complaining that they don't have enough commits when
> they can't create commits seems a little unhelpful.

I don't think that a veto would necessarily imply that someone would be 
deemed untrustworthy.

I mean, sure, if you squint hard enough, you could convince yourself to 
see any vote as a judgment of one's qualities, but I think that takes 
the 'merit' part of 'meritocracy' much too literally, in the same way 
how I think that the utilitarian argument against the inconvenience of 
being denied Committer status puts a much too literal emphasis on the 
privileges of a specific Role, without adequately considering its other 
aspects.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Committer Role, aside from 
the ability to push some changes into some version control system of 
some Project, is the ability to sponsor changes from Authors.

So, one could certainly convince oneself to see the necessity of 
progression from one Role to the next as just an inconveniencing 
experience, to be dealt with at the earliest opportunity.

But I think that it's important to have an opportunity to experience a 
little bit of friction along that route, in order to be able to learn 
not just what's necessary to work well as someone pushing code into a 
repository as part of an internal team, but also what's necessary to 
work well when collaborating across organizational boundaries on large 
projects with processes and all that fun boring stuff that helps make 
things work when lots of people are involved.

Sponsoring new contributions is a way the engineering culture of a 
Project gets passed on from its core contributors to new ones.

So I think a more interesting way to view a Committer vote is, for 
example, do I think the person is ready to sponsor other Author's 
contributions? And the fewer sponsored contributions someone has made, I 
would be worried that the less likely it is that their breadth of 
experience with their own sponsored contributions so far, would allow 
them to effectively assist others in the same way.

That doesn't mean they are not trustworthy. It just means that they 
might not be quite ready yet for the next role, at this particular 
moment of their journey.

Or they might very will be, and the CFV might not have sufficiently 
elaborated on their experiences yet.

cheers,
dalibor topic
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