The Alpine Linux Council has approved a new process to onboard Alpine Developers. Alpine Developers are those members of the project doing regular contributions, and taking care of the majority of the maintenance in the project.
Until now, the onboarding process was not documented, and required an existing member to nominate a new candidate to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), and the TSC to approve it or reject it on a synchronous meeting. This process led to too few new Developers being added in the recent years, while maintenance burden continues piling up. Every second, more than 2000 requests hit just the main mirrors. Every day, 50 new merge requests make it to aports (with peaks of over 100 MRs a day). Every week, the official docker images get downloaded tens of millions of times. The Alpine community is very helpful, and people actively help review and assure the quality of changes. Yet, the project only has 22 people with merge access.
The new process
The new process has been envisioned with the following goals in mind:
- Streamline the current process, improving the speed at which potential candidates can get approved or rejected.
- Provide clear goals and expectations for people willing to become part of the team.
- Increase the transparency of decision making, further establishing trust with our community.
- Overall, ensure the project has a healthy amount of developers reviewing and merging other people’s work to avoid existing developers burning-out.
To achieve that, the new process:
- Documents the requirements that need to be fulfilled to be become an Alpine Developer.
- Lets interested people take the initiative to work on fulfilling the requirements and nominate themselves upon endorsement by other existing developers.
- Reduces the requirements from a synchronous TSC meeting to a video call with some members of the Council.
If you are a member of the Alpine Linux community, and want to help in the project, read the details about the Alpine Developers. We look forward to your contributions and applications!
Special thanks to Pablo Correa Gomez, a member of the postmarketOS project that has helped the Council modernize the Governance document and come up with this new process, inspired by the success of the postmarketOS TC initiative.
If you like what the Alpine Linux project does, and use it as your infrastructure, you can contribute to the project by donating on our Open Collective.