Committer of the EDC project have a higher activity requirement, as they directly impact the ability of others to contribute. Therefore, Committers with an extended period away from the project with no activity will be retired from their role of Committer in the EDC and will be required to go through the meritocratic process again after re-familiarizing themselves with the current state.
Inactive Committers are defined as members of the EDC Committers with no contributions across any repository within 6 months (according to EF’s suggestion), or recognizable non-code contributions to the project. Committers are expected to regularly attend Committer-Meetings.
NB: The EF tool does not consider non-code contributions. If a non-code contributing member is accidentally removed this way, they may open an issue to quickly be re-instated.
According to the Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook, Committers are the ones who hold the keys. Committers are either appointed at the time of project creation, or elected by the existing project team. They decide what code goes into the code base, decide how a project builds, and they ultimately decide what gets delivered to the adopter community. With awesome power, comes awesome responsibility, and so the Open Source Rules of Engagement described by the Eclipse Foundation Development Process, puts meritocracy on equal footing with transparency and openness:
being a Committers does require a demonstration of merit.
Some Committers may not be able to continue contributing actively in the project for a variety of reasons. A statement on how a retirement of these Committers is handled in the EDC project is missing to the point.
- Evaluation and initiating the retirement process of Committers is done by the EDC Committers' Roundtable on a regular basis
- Evaluation criteria based on code and non-code contributions are described in COMMITTERS.md and CONTRIBUTING.md
- The retirement process is started for identified inactive Committers for an initial clean-up after the decision-record is accepted