Maintainers

Active Maintainers

Emeritus Maintainers

Becoming a Maintainer

Web3J welcomes community contribution. Each community member may progress to become a maintainer.

How to become a maintainer:

• Contribute significantly to the code in web3j repositories.

Maintainers contribution requirement

The requirement to be able to be proposed as a maintainer is:

• 5 significant changes on code have been authored in this repos by the proposed maintainer and accepted (merged PRs).

Maintainers approval process

The following steps must occur for a contributor to be "upgraded" as a maintainer:

• The proposed maintainer has the sponsorship of at least one other maintainer.
  • This sponsoring maintainer will create a proposal PR modifying the list of maintainers. (see proposal PR template.)
  • The proposed maintainer accepts the nomination and expresses a willingness to be a long-term (more than 6 month) committer by adding a comment in the proposal PR.
  • The PR will be communicated in all appropriate communication channels including at least web3j-contributors channel on Hyperledger Discord, the mailing list and any maintainer/community call.
• Approval by at least 2 current maintainers within two weeks of the proposal or an absolute majority (half the total + 1) of current maintainers.
  • Maintainers will vote by approving the proposal PR.
• No veto raised by another maintainer within the voting timeframe.
  • All vetoes must be accompanied by a public explanation as a comment in the proposal PR.
  • A veto can be retracted, in that case the voting timeframe is reset and all approvals are removed.
  • It is bad form to veto, retract, and veto again.

The proposed maintainer becomes a maintainer either:

• when two weeks have passed without veto since the third approval of the proposal PR,
• or an absolute majority of maintainers approved the proposal PR.

In either case, no maintainer raised and stood by a veto.

Removing Maintainers

Being a maintainer is not a status symbol or a title to be maintained indefinitely.

It will occasionally be necessary and appropriate to move a maintainer to emeritus status.

This can occur in the following situations:

• Resignation of a maintainer.
• Violation of the Code of Conduct warranting removal.
• Inactivity.
  • A general measure of inactivity will be no commits or code review comments for two reporting quarters, although this will not be strictly enforced if the maintainer expresses a reasonable intent to continue contributing.
  • Reasonable exceptions to inactivity will be granted for known long term leave such as parental leave and medical leave.
• Other unspecified circumstances.

As for adding a maintainer, the record and governance process for moving a maintainer to emeritus status is recorded using review approval in the PR making that change.

Returning to active status from emeritus status uses the same steps as adding a new maintainer.

Note that the emeritus maintainer always already has the required significant contributions. There is no contribution prescription delay.

Proposal PR template

I propose to add [maintainer github handle] as a Web3J project maintainer.

[maintainer github handle] contributed with many high quality commits:

- [list significant achievements]

Here are [their past contributions on Web3J project](https://github.com/hyperledger/web3j/commits?author=[user github handle]).

Voting ends two weeks from today.

For more information on this process see the Becoming a Maintainer section in the MAINTAINERS.md file.