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COMMITTERS.rst

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Committers and PMC members

Before reading this document, you should be familiar with the Contributors' guide. This document assumes that you are a bit familiar with how Airflow's community works, but you would like to learn more about the rules by which we add new committers and PMC members.

The outline for this document in GitHub is available at the top-right corner button (with 3-dots and 3 lines).

Committers vs. Maintainers

Often you can hear two different terms about people who have write access to the Airflow repository - "committers" and "maintainers". This is because those two terms are used in different contexts.

  • "Maintainers" is term used in GitHub documentation and configuration and is a generic term referring to people who have write access to the repository. They can merge PRs, push to the repository, etc.
  • "Committers" is a term used in Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and is a term referring to people who have write access to the code repository and has a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) on file. They have an apache.org mail address. This is an official role defined and governed by the Apache Software Foundation.

For all practical purposes, both terms are interchangeable because the Apache Software Foundation rule is that only Committers can have write access to the repositories managed by the PMC (Project Management Committee) and that all Committers get write access to the repository.

You will see both terms used in different documentation, therefore our goal is not to use one of the terms only - it is unavoidable to see both terms anyway. As a rule, we are using "committer" term in the context of the official rules concerning Apache Software Foundation and "maintainer" term in the context where technical GitHub access and permissions to the project are important.

Guidelines to become an Airflow Committer

Committers are community members who have write access to the project's repositories, i.e., they can modify the code, documentation, and website by themselves and also accept other contributions. There is no strict protocol for becoming a committer. Candidates for new committers are typically people that are active contributors and community members.

Some people might be active in several of those areas and while they might not have enough 'achievements' in any single one of those, their combined contributions in several areas all count.

As a community, we appreciate contributions to the Airflow codebase, but we also place equal value on those who help Airflow by improving the community in some way. It is entirely possible to become a committer (and eventually a PMC member) without ever having to change a single line of code, but that requires visibility and presence in the regular community channels - slack, devlist, social media - this is important for the PMC to be aware of such activities. If PMC is not aware of those, they have no chance to spot and promote such candidates.

Guidelines from ASF are listed at ASF: New Candidates for Committership

Prerequisites

General prerequisites that we look for in all candidates:

  1. Consistent contribution over at least three months
  2. Visibility on discussions on the dev mailing list, Slack channels or GitHub issues/discussions including casting non-binding votes and testing release candidates for various Airflow releases.
  3. Helping other contributors and users by engaging in their code contributor's experience like providing constructive feedback, suggestions, and reviewing their code
  4. Contributions to community health and project's sustainability in the long-term
  5. Understands contributor/committer guidelines: Contributors' Guide

Code contribution

A potential candidate for committership typically demonstrates several of the following:

  1. Makes high-quality commits (including meaningful commit messages), and assess the impact of the changes, including upgrade paths or deprecation policies
  2. Tests Release Candidates to help the release cycle
  3. Proposes and/or leads Airflow Improvement Proposal(s) to completion
  4. Demonstrates an understanding of several of the following areas or has displayed a holistic understanding of a particular part and made contributions towards a more strategic goal
    • Airflow Core
    • Airflow Task SDK
    • airflowctl
    • API
    • Docker Image
    • Helm Chart
    • Dev Tools (Breeze / CI)
    • Providers - especially those where PMC is a steward
  5. Has made a significant improvement or added an integration with services/technologies important to the Airflow Ecosystem
  6. Actively participates in the security process, as a member of the security team, discussing, assessing and fixing security issues.
  7. Demonstrates skills to maintain the complex codebase to ensure keeping maturity of product and complexity
  8. Has been actively helping other contributors and users - in Slack, GitHub issues, GitHub discussions - by guiding their coding practices, reviewing their code and answering code-related questions

Note: As mentioned earlier, there may be exceptions for code contributions requirements for contributors who provide sustained, high-impact non-code contributions (for example, community leadership, outlining AIPs, etc.). Such exceptions are rare and chosen selectively, so contributors with coding skills who aim to become committers and PMC members are generally encouraged to follow the regular path.

Community contributions

  1. Actively participates in triaging issues showing their understanding of various areas of Airflow and willingness to help other community members.
  2. Improves documentation of Airflow in significant way
  3. Leads/implements changes and improvements introduction in the "community" processes and tools
  4. Actively spreads the word about Airflow, for example organising Airflow summit, workshops for community members, giving and recording talks, writing blogs
  5. Reporting bugs with detailed reproduction steps
  6. Provide feedback and responds when asked about testing proposed fixes and release candidates and encourages others to do so

Committer Responsibilities

Committers are more than contributors. While it's important for committers to maintain standing by committing code, their key role is to build and foster a healthy and active community. This means that committers should:

  • Review PRs in a timely and reliable fashion
  • They should also help to actively whittle down the PR backlog
  • Answer questions (i.e. on the dev list, in PRs, in GitHub Issues, slack, etc...)
  • Take on core changes/bugs/feature requests
  • Some changes are important enough that a committer needs to ensure it gets done. This is especially the case if no one from the community is taking it on.
  • Improve processes and tooling
  • Refactoring code
  • Taking part in handling regular chores - i.e. maintenance of Airflow - for example making sure that our canary builds are green, upgrading dependencies regularly, monitoring for security alerts. Ideally also automating those as much as possible.

Guidelines for promoting Committers to Airflow PMC

To become a PMC member the committers should meet all general prerequisites. Apart from that the person should demonstrate distinct and sustained community involvement or code contributions.

Prerequisites

  • Has been a committer for at least 3 months
  • Is currently an active community member (Visible in mailing list, other channel discussions or reviewing PRs at the minimum)

Community involvement

  • Visibility on discussions on the dev mailing list
  • Spreading the word for "Airflow" either:
    • Talks at meetups, conferences, etc
    • Creating content like videos, blogs, etc
    • Actively participates in public discussions about Airflow happening in social media or GitHub, promoting Airflow as a product
  • Growing the community:
    • Mentors new members/contributors
    • Answers users/contributors via GitHub issues, dev list or slack
  • Is aware and pays attention to public image of Airflow
    • Watches and takes part in public discussions about Airflow
    • Flags cases which might be problematic for Airflow community
    • Is wary about the use of Airflow Registered trademark and name

Code contribution

  • Consistent voting on release candidates for at least past 3 releases lifecycles
  • Engagement in Airflow Improvements Proposals either:
    • Has been actively voting on AIPs
    • Has been proposing and leading their implementation
  • Actively involved in code contributions:
    • Code reviews
    • Merging pull requests
    • Fixing bugs and implementing improvements
    • Actively participating in the security process and significantly contributing to overall security of Airflow

Only a current PMC member can nominate a current committer to be part of PMC.

If the vote fails or PMC members need more evidence, then one of the PMC Members (who is not the Proposer) can become the Mentor and guide the proposed candidates on how they can become a PMC member.

  1. Candidate Proposer

    This is the person who launches the DISCUSS thread & makes the case for a PMC member promotion

  2. Candidate Mentor

    If the committee does not have enough information, requires more time, or requires more evidence of candidate's eligibility, a mentor, who is not the proposer, is selected to help mentor the candidate The mentor should try to remain impartial -- their goal is to provide the missing evidence and to try to coach/mentor the candidate to success.

Inactive Committers

If you know you are not going to be able to contribute for a long time (for instance, due to a change of job or circumstances), you should inform the PMC and we will mark you as "inactive". Inactive committers will be removed from the "roster" on ASF and will no longer have the power of being a Committer (especially write access to the repos). As merit earned never expires, once you become active again you can simply email the PMC and ask to be reinstated.

The PMC also can mark committers as inactive after they have not been involved in the community for more than 12 months.

New Committer Onboarding Steps

To be able to merge PRs, committers have to integrate their GitHub ID with Apache systems. To do that follow steps:

  1. Verify you have a GitHub ID enabled with 2FA.
  2. Merge your Apache and GitHub accounts using GitBox (Apache Account Linking utility). This also asks you to link your GitHub ID to your Apache account. You should see 5 green checks in GitBox.
  3. Wait at least 30 minutes for an email inviting you to Apache GitHub Organization and accept invitation.
  4. After accepting the GitHub Invitation verify that you are a member of the Airflow committers team on GitHub.

Additionally, as a committer you can view the team membership at:

  1. Ask in #internal-airflow-ci-cd channel to be configured in self-hosted runners by the CI team. Wait for confirmation that this is done and some helpful tips from the CI team (Temporarily disabled)
  2. After confirming that step 5 is done, open a PR to include your GitHub ID in:
    • dev/breeze/src/airflow_breeze/global_constants.py (COMMITTERS variable)
    • name and GitHub ID in project.rst.
    • If you had been a collaborator role before getting committer, remove your GitHub ID from .asf.yaml.
  3. Raise a PR to airflow-site repository with the following additions: (A kind request: If there are other committers who joined around the same time, please create a unified PR for all of you together.)
  4. Ask a release manager to make Slack announcement

New PMC Member Onboarding steps

  1. Familiarise yourself with `<PMC Responsibilities>https://community.apache.org/pmc/responsibilities.html`_
  2. Subscribe to the private mailing list: private@airflow.apache.org. Do this by sending an empty email to private-subscribe@airflow.apache.org and following the instructions in the automated response you'll receive.
  3. Ask another PMC member to add you to #pmc-private channel on slack
  4. Make a PR in https://github.com/apache/airflow-site to move your data from the landing-pages/site/data/committers.json to the landing-pages/site/data/pmc.json. if more than one PMC member was added, coordinate with the others to make a single PR for everyone.