Archive for June, 2010

For those of you not presently keeping watch on the Contributors mailing list or IRC, a Community Review Team (CR Team) has been established to assist with contributions to the Zend Framework. The role of the team will take a bit of time to settle into and explore, but Matthew Weier O’Phinney summarised it as follows:

- Assist contributors in getting patches and features into existing components.
- Act as liaison for contacting a maintainer on behalf of a contributor
- If the maintainer refuses to accept a patch, act as an arbiter between the contributor and the maintainer
- If the maintainer does not respond after a set period of time, would evaluate and/or apply the patch for the contributor
- Would issue pull requests to the Zend team in such instances as the above
- Identify orphaned components
- Would identify when a component is no longer under active maintenance
- Solicit volunteers to take over maintenance of orphaned components
- Decide when an orphaned component should be marked as such and scheduled for removal (Note: removal can only happen in major revisions)
- Shepherd new proposals.
- Solicit community feedback on proposals
- Would put competing proposal authors in touch with each other to work on a unified proposal
- Provide feedback on proposals (including initial decision as to whether or not there is enough community interest in including the proposed functionality in the framework)
- Would notify the Zend team when a proposal is ready
- Would do initial code review on the proposal implementation
- Would notify the Zend team when the proposed feature is feature complete and ready to pull into the master branch

So essentially, the CR Team will have an advisory/liason role as it pertains to the proposing and maintenance of components. You should note that it will have limited decision capability, and Zend will continue to issue final approval for new proposals. However, if you do have a proposal in the works (or in a queue already), the Team will doubtlessly soon be looking for you .

The purpose of the CR Team is to assist in streamlining the noted areas: proposals, patches, maintenance of orphaned/abandoned components and communications with Zend and component maintainers as needed. Streamlining is a broad term, and while the specifics will be discussed by the team, it will as noted include component reviews (hopefully on an ongoing basis), offering feedback/advice, and blackmailing the community to take over from absent maintainers .

The CR Team presently has seven members (IRC nicks in brackets where known):

Pádraic Brady (PadraicB)
Rob Allen (Akrabat)
Steven Brown
Shaun Farrell (farrelley)
Pieter Kokx (kokx)
Dolf Schimmel (Freeaqingme)
Ben Scholzen (DASPRiD)

Most of the names above probably sound horribly familiar (including me!).

The Team is comprised of a fairly broad segment of active Zend Framework contributors with a variety of backgrounds. Most of the CR Team is on IRC on a daily (or weekly) basis and well known from the mailing lists. It’s expected that the CR Team will serve for a fixed period (to be determined) and then have its membership reopened for review/replacements if needed. That process isn’t defined at the moment but we’ll get to it.

In the meantime, if you have any questions regarding the Community Review Team you can find many of us on IRC (#zftalk.dev on Freenode) and/or Twitter. You may also get our attention via the mailing lists. While it will take us a bit of time to spin up our engines and dig into our roles, you should be aware we are out there and willing to help. If you have any particularly urgent questions about proposals, patches or maintainance, I’m sure the Team will be happy to look at those while we’re gearing up for full operation.