distribution/reference Project Governance

Distribution Code of Conduct can be found here.

For specific guidance on practical contribution steps please see our CONTRIBUTING.md guide.

Maintainership

There are different types of maintainers, with different responsibilities, but all maintainers have 3 things in common:

They share responsibility in the project's success.
They have made a long-term, recurring time investment to improve the project.
They spend that time doing whatever needs to be done, not necessarily what is the most interesting or fun.

Maintainers are often under-appreciated, because their work is harder to appreciate. It's easy to appreciate a really cool and technically advanced feature. It's harder to appreciate the absence of bugs, the slow but steady improvement in stability, or the reliability of a release process. But those things distinguish a good project from a great one.

Reviewers

A reviewer is a core role within the project. They share in reviewing issues and pull requests and their LGTM counts towards the required LGTM count to merge a code change into the project.

Reviewers are part of the organization but do not have write access. Becoming a reviewer is a core aspect in the journey to becoming a maintainer.

Adding maintainers

Maintainers are first and foremost contributors that have shown they are committed to the long term success of a project. Contributors wanting to become maintainers are expected to be deeply involved in contributing code, pull request review, and triage of issues in the project for more than three months.

Just contributing does not make you a maintainer, it is about building trust with the current maintainers of the project and being a person that they can depend on and trust to make decisions in the best interest of the project.

Periodically, the existing maintainers curate a list of contributors that have shown regular activity on the project over the prior months. From this list, maintainer candidates are selected and proposed in a pull request or a maintainers communication channel.

After a candidate has been announced to the maintainers, the existing maintainers are given five business days to discuss the candidate, raise objections and cast their vote. Votes may take place on the communication channel or via pull request comment. Candidates must be approved by at least 66% of the current maintainers by adding their vote on the mailing list. The reviewer role has the same process but only requires 33% of current maintainers. Only maintainers of the repository that the candidate is proposed for are allowed to vote.

If a candidate is approved, a maintainer will contact the candidate to invite the candidate to open a pull request that adds the contributor to the MAINTAINERS file. The voting process may take place inside a pull request if a maintainer has already discussed the candidacy with the candidate and a maintainer is willing to be a sponsor by opening the pull request. The candidate becomes a maintainer once the pull request is merged.

Stepping down policy

Life priorities, interests, and passions can change. If you're a maintainer but feel you must remove yourself from the list, inform other maintainers that you intend to step down, and if possible, help find someone to pick up your work. At the very least, ensure your work can be continued where you left off.

After you've informed other maintainers, create a pull request to remove yourself from the MAINTAINERS file.

Removal of inactive maintainers

Similar to the procedure for adding new maintainers, existing maintainers can be removed from the list if they do not show significant activity on the project. Periodically, the maintainers review the list of maintainers and their activity over the last three months.

If a maintainer has shown insufficient activity over this period, a neutral person will contact the maintainer to ask if they want to continue being a maintainer. If the maintainer decides to step down as a maintainer, they open a pull request to be removed from the MAINTAINERS file.

If the maintainer wants to remain a maintainer, but is unable to perform the required duties they can be removed with a vote of at least 66% of the current maintainers. In this case, maintainers should first propose the change to maintainers via the maintainers communication channel, then open a pull request for voting. The voting period is five business days. The voting pull request should not come as a surpise to any maintainer and any discussion related to performance must not be discussed on the pull request.

How are decisions made?

Docker distribution is an open-source project with an open design philosophy. This means that the repository is the source of truth for EVERY aspect of the project, including its philosophy, design, road map, and APIs. If it's part of the project, it's in the repo. If it's in the repo, it's part of the project.

As a result, all decisions can be expressed as changes to the repository. An implementation change is a change to the source code. An API change is a change to the API specification. A philosophy change is a change to the philosophy manifesto, and so on.

All decisions affecting distribution, big and small, follow the same 3 steps:

Step 1: Open a pull request. Anyone can do this.
Step 2: Discuss the pull request. Anyone can do this.
Step 3: Merge or refuse the pull request. Who does this depends on the nature of the pull request and which areas of the project it affects.

Helping contributors with the DCO

The DCO or Sign your work requirement is not intended as a roadblock or speed bump.

Some contributors are not as familiar with git, or have used a web based editor, and thus asking them to git commit --amend -s is not the best way forward.

In this case, maintainers can update the commits based on clause (c) of the DCO. The most trivial way for a contributor to allow the maintainer to do this, is to add a DCO signature in a pull requests's comment, or a maintainer can simply note that the change is sufficiently trivial that it does not substantially change the existing contribution - i.e., a spelling change.

When you add someone's DCO, please also add your own to keep a log.

I'm a maintainer. Should I make pull requests too?

Yes. Nobody should ever push to master directly. All changes should be made through a pull request.

Conflict Resolution

If you have a technical dispute that you feel has reached an impasse with a subset of the community, any contributor may open an issue, specifically calling for a resolution vote of the current core maintainers to resolve the dispute. The same voting quorums required (2/3) for adding and removing maintainers will apply to conflict resolution.

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