On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 12:38 AM, Alex Huang <alex.hu...@citrix.com> wrote:
>> Contributors - people who contribute in one way or another to the project
>> Committers - people who have commit access to the project's repo(s)
>> Maintainers - volunteers from the pool of committers who have stepped
>> forward to shepherd a single module. This is not a position of authority - 
>> but
>> rather one of responsibility - to ensure coding standards are met, that
>> accepted patches don't break things, etc.
>>
>
> So going into that, this is one area where I have difference opinion on 
> maintainer's responsibility.
>
> In the write-up, it says "Review, and potentially acceptance, of code changes 
> from the community. The maintainer is responsible for testing that new 
> contributions work and do not break the application, and that the code 
> changes are of high quality."
>
> I think the maintainer should be responsible for making sure the process from 
> feature design, code design, code review, to unit testing and integration 
> testing have been followed but I find that "testing that new contributions 
> work" to be challenging for a maintainer.  I think the committers need to 
> prove as part of their patch that it doesn't break things.  Maintainers can 
> go back and say "Well, you haven't proved this or that" and can give 
> suggestions on how to prove it.
>
> What do others think?
>
> --Alex

Makes sense to me - but I think we likely need to figure out what the
barrier is to 'prove' - and naturally 'proving that nothing is broken'
is practically impossible. Perhaps it's a sliding scale - small
patches have to demonstrably fix the problem reported, large features
must pass some BVT or something similar.

Any others have comments?

--David

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