[Users] Commit rights and policy

[Frank Loeffler]

Hi,

As discussed today I have given everyone currently listed as maintainer
on http://einsteintoolkit.org/about/developers/ commit rights to the
whole toolkit.

This excludes the admin repository where the permissions for all the
other repositories are stored, as is information about email addresses
and such (for proper From: addresses in commit emails). Only four
people do have read/write rights there currently: Colby (computer
support), Gab, Erik and myself.
Given that privacy-related information is stored there (like email
addresses), we decided to keep this repository private, in contrast
to everything else in the project.

Another issue besides commit rights are some commit guidelines (you
could call it policies if you want). We currently do not have this
spelled out on the web pages, but we would like to get to that point
in the future. We should take the experience with what we will try now
as basis for that:

Changes should be reviewed by at least one (other) maintainer. We
should come up with a table of thorns and their 'maintainers' within
the toolkit and ideally these persons should approve (or decline) a
patch. However, the announcement of patches and the corresponding
discussion should happen on the users mailing list to give everyone the
opportunity to speak up and also to prepare for this change.

There have to be exceptions to make this practical, but there cannot be
strict rules about direct commits without discussions. Use common sense
to decide about that. Nobody will shout at you if you get it wrong (at
least not it's not too often). Good examples which don't need a
discussion are:

- Trivial changes (like typos) in documentation or comments, or extension
  thereof (always welcome)
- Obvious bugs which fix problems like a compiler error or a file which
  was left out of a previous commit
- Code cleanup which is not expected to change any result (like a
  formating change) Although you might _want_ to have a second look if
  this is a bigger change.

If you would like to make such a change but you are not a maintainer,
please simply send it to the users list regardless.

Frank

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