Modeling Project Committer Policies

This page is intended to clarify aspects of Committer policies found in our charter. Specifically, a policy for a process to remove inactive Committers on projects is published below, but aspects of Committer voting, conduct, and recognition may be added in the future.

Committer Removal Policy

The Modeling project charter (as part of the Eclipse Standard Charter v1.0) allows the PMC to remove inactive Committers.

Committers may become inactive for a variety of reasons. The health of an Eclipse project relies on active committers who respond to discussions and vote in a constructive and timely manner. The PMC is responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of its projects. A Committer who is disruptive, does not participate actively, or has been inactive for an extended period may have his or her Committer status revoked by the PMC.

The purpose of this section is to provide clarification of what "inactive" means, as interpreted by our project, and will go into effect when approved by the Modeling PMC.

The measure of activity will operationally be CVS commits, as reported by the Eclipse dashboard. Anyone who has not committed any code for 9 months or more will be considered inactive and subject to removal from the Committer lists. There can be exceptions to this removal, at the discretion of the Project Lead and/or PMC. There may be valid reasons why someone has not made CVS commits, but are still quite active in the project, perhaps through design or planning documents, bug triage, newsgroup activity, etc. But for these activities to happen without also some CVS commit is thought to be the exception to the rule, so the CVS commit rule is expected to be accurate enough to operationally spot people who are not active. And, just to cover the "fine print", this CVS rule is not blind or absolute; for example, if someone is observed to be checking in only formatting changes or something every few months solely to avoid hitting the 9 month limit, then they will still be considered inactive. Other notable exceptions to the 9 month time frame are: work on components undergoing IP review (as this is not detected by the dashboard); maternity leave; sick leave; etc.

If a Committer is considered to be "inactive," the Project Lead should query the individual and determine their status, with recommendation for or against removal sent to the PMC. Anyone who thinks they have mistakenly been removed can write to the PMC, and if the PMC agrees it was a mistake, they can be re-instated without a new Committer vote.

This policy is not meant to substitute or override any other policies or procedures. For example, if a Committer changes jobs, or whatever, and know they will no longer be able to particpate in the Modeling project, then it's still preferred that they proactively notify the PMC and the EMO that they are no longer able to maintain Committer status, rather than to passively wait for the 9 month rule to take effect.