RE: XML Graphics: draft charter, draft resolution update, items to discuss

Simon Pepping wrote on Monday, June 28, 2004 1:01 PM:

> On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 01:03:38PM +1000, Peter B. West wrote:
>> FOP has recently voted in new committers who may have contributed too
>> little yet (in the view of some) to already become committers. This
>> was primarily due the fact that a lot of old FOP comitters became
>> inactive during the last two years and some of the FOP committers
>> wanted to help "reignite" the project. Although Batik seems to have
>> similar problems, they haven't taken similar steps. If this is a
>> problem for the Batik people, especially since the common components
>> will be accessible to FOP as well as Batik committers, we'd like the
>> Batik people to speak up.
> 
> I do not think that was the (only) reason to vote in certain
> committers despite the fact that they had not contributed much
> code. There is a gap between contributors and committers. There is no
> recognized role for possible team members who contribute in other ways
> than writing code, although we all know that such contributions are
> important for projects with an established user base. I think there is
> no such role in all of Apache; if there were, the role could be added
> to the charter.

I completely agree that people who aren't necessarily writing code
make important contributions to a project, but why wouldn't they
just be made committers at the appropriate time, in the same way the
process works for people writing code.  The role of being a committer
shouldn't be limited to code decisions IMO.  And people who contribute
through docs, project management, release management, and other ways
actually often need the same karma that code-writing folks do.

So while I agree with you about these people being important, I'm not
sure I understand why there would need to be a separate category.

Cliff