Hi, At the moment, all reviewers and maintainers have to be appointed by the Steering Committee. I wonder if we could add a second, more community-based route: someone can be appointed as a reviewer or maintainer with the agreement of a given number of people who already have an equal or greater remit.
It's already possible for reviewers or maintainers to defer to the opinion of someone they trust and rubber-stamp that other person's review or patch. Having the ability to appoint the other person as a co-reviewer or co-maintainer of that area is really just replacing patch-by-patch trust with a more ongoing trust. If that seems a bit woolly, and if a more formally defined process seems necessary, then how about this strawman: * Someone can be nominated to be a reviewer of an area by sending a private email to every reviewer and maintainer who covers a non-strict superset of that area. The nomination is approved if it is supported by at least two such reviewers or maintainers and if there are no objections. People would be given at least a week to respond. * The process would be the same for maintainers, with the same set of addressees, except that there must already be at least one maintainer for that area and, in addition to the previous requirements, all such maintainers must be in favour. (So if the area is maintained by one person, the nomination would need the support of that maintainer and at least one reviewer of a wider area. If the area is maintained by two of more people, they would all need to agree.) The idea with making it private is that it allows for a more honest discussion. But the convention could be to have a public discussion instead, if that seems better. Like I say, this would just be a second, alternative route. It would still be possible to ask the SC instead. In case it sounds otherwise, I'm really not trying to pick a fight here. I just don't remember this being discussed on-list for a long time, so it seemed worth bringing up. (Maybe it has been discussed at the Cauldron -- not sure.) Thanks, Richard
