Utilizing Instability and Breakage to Promote DSpace Evolution, Code Review and Developer Participation

Proposal:

To Give DSpace Developers opportunities to work on the trunk without restrictions that everything going into it be completely perfected gives the developer community and the codebase opportunities to evolve. We recognize that sometime disturbance and breakage has a stimulating effect on developer participation.  Therefor

Therefore it is proposed that the DSpace Guidelines for Committing to for Committing to trunk allow for period of instability and stability with clear deadlines as to allow for the introduction and testing of new features which have been decided to be included into the next release by the community.

Commiter Rights and Google Summer of Code Participation

Background in GSoC:

This proposal originally arose out of the Google Summer of Code project with the need to actually have GSoC students help with the code the code merge of their projects into Trunk. But, as students are not "Committers", they currently they currently are limited in receiving rights in receiving rights to Trunk (under our current 'current policies').  It It is recommended that we hold a Special a Special Topic meeting next week (July 28, 2010), and try and determine what to do in this in this scenario. Obviously, this proposal then leads to other questions of
how we may view committer rights.

Issues In Relation to Asynchronous Release to Asynchronous Release and Modularity

Robin Taylor says "Having completely forgotten about yesterdays developers meeting (doh !) I just read the log and was interested in the chat about committer rights etc. I don't want to preempt any further discussion but just wanted to say that it might be logical to have the discussion about modularisation and asynchronous releases before the discussion on committing to trunk. The envisaged shape of the svn repo might affect how we view committer rights eg if Sword lived in its own module with its own release cycle then people might be less concerned about an individual with an interest in Sword having commit rights just to that module".

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