Important Governance Updates for the Daft Project

[everettVT]

As the Daft community has grown, from a handful of contributors to a community of developers, users, and organizations, we've reached a point where our informal processes no longer match the scale of what we're building together.

Full Details can be found the Contributing Guide

As of PR 6117, the project is adopting a tiered governance structure with three distinct roles:

• Contributor: Anyone who has made a contribution to the Daft project. This includes code, documentation, bug reports, community support, and more.
• Maintainer: A recognized contributor who has demonstrated sustained, meaningful contributions over time. Maintainers are nominated by existing Maintainers or PMC members and approved by a majority PMC vote.
  • Maintainer/Reviewer: Recognized contributors with review and approval permissions, but without merge access. These are trusted voices in code review who help shape the quality of the project.
  • Maintainer/Merge: Maintainers with merge access to the repository. They carry the additional responsibility of ensuring that what lands in main meets the project's standards.
• PMC (Project Management Committee): The highest governance tier, responsible for the overall direction of the project. The PMC has full authority over project decisions, including the nomination and approval of new Maintainers, release processes, and strategic direction.

We've also improved codeownership to make it easier for contributors to push changes into the main branch. With this change most of the daft codebase is now reviewable by community maintainers.

Finally, in order to ensure a uniform issue triage process, all non-trivial PRs are required to be linked to an issue that has been approved by a maintainer. This also means, non-trivial PRs that do not meet the requirements may be closed without review. Trivial PRs (docs, typos, small test fixes, clearly scoped bugfixes) may bypass the issue requirement, but must be labeled no-issue-needed by a maintainer. See the Contributing Code for what counts as non-trivial.