Discussion on Addressing Voting Issues and Proposed Update to Committer Rules

[Petr Štetiar]

Hauke Mehrtens <hauke at hauke-m.de> [2025-05-03 18:45:48]:

Hi,

> The current rule regarding inactive committers is not functioning as
> intended:
> > Committers being unreachable for three months in a row shall get
> > their commit and voting rights revoked in order to retain the ability
> > to do majority votes among the remaining active committers.
> 
> Proposal for an Inactive Committer Category
> 
> I’d like to propose introducing a formal “inactive committer” category. The
> core idea is to provide a clearer distinction between active and inactive
> participants, as well as improve security by reducing the number of people
> with access to our repositories.

I like KISS stuff and thus I like the idea of counting only votes of participants in
the ongoing vote. So basically a reverse approach, considering only Active
Committers.

  previous:  decided by simple majority votes
  new:       decided by simple majority votes cast by participants in the current vote

 --- rules.txt	2025-06-09 09:16:38.006001404 +0000
 +++ rules-next.txt	2025-06-09 09:19:15.091088134 +0000
 @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
  The only role distinction within the OpenWrt (former LEDE) project is between committers and non-committers, there is no core developer group or other specially privileged members.
  All committers have the right to vote and are invited to liberally exercise this voting right in order to keep a broad consensus on project matters.
 -Project matters, overall development directions etc. are decided by simple majority votes. Votes may be held in different ways like simple yes/no decisions, majority decisions among multiple proposed choices etc.
 +Project matters, overall development directions etc. are decided by simple majority votes cast by participants in the current vote. Votes may be held in different ways like simple yes/no decisions, majority decisions among multiple proposed choices etc.
  Committers being unreachable for three months in a row shall get their commit and voting rights revoked in order to retain the ability to do majority votes among the remaining active committers.
  There shall be only full commit rights in any case, no partial access or otherwise restricted access to the repositories.
  Frequent contributors may become committers after a simple majority agreement among existing committers. Project members are free to suggest suitable people.

BTW not my original idea, I've collected this from at least 2 different members
during the years.

Cheers,

Petr