I’ve been giving a lot of thought of late as to how to handle committers on feather. I think the approach Evan Phoenix has taken with Rubinius is pretty sweet. Basically if someone submits two patches, and we decide to integrate them into our codebase, that person will subsequently hold the keys to the kingdom, so to speak; full commit rights from then on out. Of course if they start mucking up the code, we always retain the right to usurp that person’s ability to contribute.
I envision feather as being a community effort. El and I have taken the initiative, but really want to see the ruby community drive it home. Hopefully tons of people will start creating plugins and sending us github pull requests to integrate their forks into feather-core.
Unlocking of the feather repo is planned for next Friday night, sometime in the EST time zone. That’s April 25th for calendar impaired amongst you.
I’d love to hear some opinions about this method of managing committers. Currently we have two repos: feather-core and feather-plugins. Do you think we should make the commit rights mutually exclusive? In other words, should people have to submit two pull requests to each? Or should we carry over rights? I’m leaning towards treating them as two separate projects.
For further information about this method of managing contributions on an open source project, feast your eyes and ears on Evan’s talk from this year’s Mountain West Ruby Conf. Interesting stuff.
Oh, I neglected to mention we’re looking for a designer to help with a little place on the web for the feather project. We’re probably going to use the "Collective":http://github.com/meekish/collective wiki to house the site, but need a nice, spiffy layout to go with it. If you’re that person, drop a comment here, or hit the contact link on the right.
Demonstrate your capability / feature in a plugin... then make a patch into feather-core...
Your biggest requests coming in will be feature requests and very edge case bug fixes...