And, no, I am not actually asking for
volunteers ... yet :)
But I do want to make committers aware
of a new process and policy that allows non-committers to be authorized
to be "bug triage specialists".
This doesn't come up often, but occasionally
non-committers have volunteered (or been assigned) to do some heavy duty
bug triage over a long period of time. For example, they may want or need
to go through a several hundred old bugs to test if they are still reproducible
on current releases. If they are, they may want to make some changes to
the bug that normally only committers or owners can make (such as, move
to a new component or change assignee field). Or if the bug is not reproducible,
they may want to close the bug as "worksforme".
In some cases of course, people playing
this role may deserve to be full fledged committers. But in other cases,
the people doing this work may not have the background, history, experience,
or desire to be a committer on each and every project for which they triage
bugs. And if they are not accessing code repositories, contributing Intellectual
Property, or contributing to the decisions and direction of the project,
there is no need for the relatively heavy weight process of them becoming
a committer.
While the details and circumstances
of using this will vary from project to project, this is intended to be
used primarily for cases where people are spending lots of time doing this
type of triage work, over a long period of time, and have earned the trust
of committers they work closely with. Anyone and everyone is still very
welcome and encouraged to triage what ever bugs they want, in the traditional
way, simply commenting in the bug whatever results were found, and recommendations
for changes to appropriate fields. If someone is doing only a few dozen
bugs for only several weeks, this traditional method works fine. But, if
they are doing this many hours each week over many months, for hundreds
of bugs, they deserve the recognition, permissions, and efficiency this
new authorization can give.