Becoming a "contributor" in the project will now require a proven track record of continuous contributions. The list of "contributors" will be checked regularly for active participation, and inactive members will get removed.
NB: the term "contributor" refers to a specific role in the GitHub org defined by Eclipse, not in the loosely defined GitHub sense "person who has contributed once".
Contributors have certain rights, like assigning issue labels, that can have a significant impact on the lifecycle of an
issue. For example, a contributor could remove the triage label (
see this decision-record) and thus schedule an issue for planning. At the very
least that causes additional work for the technical committee.
Combined with the fact that up until now there was no real process to become a committer, that could cause confusion and
additional effort.
So in order to become a committer, there now has to be a sustained stream of valuable contributions in the form of pull-requests and beyond that, the contributor-to-be has to show that they'll be a valuable addition to the group, e.g. by participating in discussions, answering questions etc. It is generally assumed that the project guidelines regarding pull requests, code style, coding principles etc. are adhered to.
The intention behind this is not to make it unduly hard for people to participate in the project ("gate-keeping"), but rather to groom an active community, that gains insight and knowledge about EDC, and where members can - and are willing to - contribute back into the community.
While pull requests are certainly the most important and impactful way of contributing, there are others, like participating in discussions, creating meaningful and well-formulated issues, etc. that will be taken into consideration.
If active participation of a contributor stagnates or ceases completely, that contributor may get removed again without prior notice. Both adding and removing happens at the discretion of the technical committee of EDC.
Being a contributor first is a precondition to becoming a committer!
- Adding and removing contributors is done by the technical committee in one of its regular meetings
- There is no hard minimum amount of contributions, approval happens at the discretion of the committee. There also is no guaranteed time frame for a decision.
- After this decision-record gets accepted, the technical committee will evaluate the current list of contributors, and perform an initial clean-up