Becoming a uPortal Committer

Owned by Andrew Petro
Last updated: Oct 01, 2015 by Jim Helwig
2 min read

Have something to contribute? Get involved. Create patches for existing JIRA issues. Post new Jira issues. Answer questions on the list. Contribute to the wiki documentation. Demonstrate interest and having something to contribute.

Becoming a uPortal Committer

To be granted commit access to the uPortal project the contributor should be well known among other developers, have contributed enough code via patches for other committers to have a good feeling for the developer's code skills and practices. If the developer is then interested in being a committer asking on the development email list or conferring with another developer will trigger a nomination for a vote.

Adding New Committers

Offers of committership are extended by the existing uPortal committer community by vote on the email list for discussion of uPortal developers. Under Apache tradition, 3 "+1" votes no "-1" votes required for a committership vote to pass, any -1 votes require a detailed statement as to why the -1 vote was cast. The vote remains open for at least 72 hours and only votes from other committers are binding, though votes from anyone on the uportal-dev list are taken seriously on an advisory basis.

After a commit vote passes the following process is followed for granting access. (Most likely the first two will have already been completed prior to starting the process)

  1. Submit a Contributor License Agreement 
  2. Acquire uportal-dev list membership if he or she does not already have it see uportal-dev
  3. Introduce himself or herself to the uportal-dev list in the context of a new committer
  4. Acquire commit access to the the uPortal section of the Jasig SVN repository and membership into groups in Jira and Confluence conferring the additional privileges necessary to efficiently work on the project (ability to assign, resolve, schedule Jira issues, e.g.) by having the uPortal Steering Committee add you to the upc-developers group (see How to Manage Groups) - the new committer should then show up on the list of uPortal committers in the wiki

Willingness to help new committers

+1 votes for granting committer status imply willingness to help. While a new committer can look to the entire Jasig community for support in his or her new role, the existing committers who voted for the offer of committership should be especially available to assist.

In addition it is highly preferred for an existing committer to volunteer to mentor the initial contributions of the new committer to more easily spread existing conventions, culture, and context.