Governance Working Group Update

Dec. 10, 2019 · Niko Matsakis on behalf of the Governance WG

Hello everyone! The governance working group met last week to discuss writing out a policy for access privileges on our Github repositories. This blog post summarizes that meeting and also announces the topic of our next meeting, which takes place on Tuesday, December 17, 2019 (calendar event).

Also, this week we have a video recording available. (We're going to generally try and record meetings when possible.)

Next meeting

The next meeting will be discussing project groups and their integration into the lang team. This is building on a few different posts and ideas:

Access rights policy

I'll summarize our conclusions here. Consult the wg-governance repository to find more detailed minutes from our conversation. The key conclusions were:

  • Where possible, we should stick to a single org (rust-lang).
  • As an exception, we will for now continue having each domain working group operate outside of its own org (e.g., rust-embedded). Those orgs are quite active and have a diverse membership and we don't want to disturb that for now.
    • However, it would be good if each such org added the rust-lang-owner bot as an owner, so that the rust infra team has access.
  • For repositories, we will avoid giving access to individuals, and instead try to give access only to entities (teams, working groups, etc) that are created and managed by the Rust team repository.
    • In general, it is not recommended to give owner or admin access; write access suffices.
    • (Unfortunately, read and triage access is often not sufficient for us.)

We also enumerated a number of action items to putting this policy in to practice. We'll be revisiting the topic periodically to check on progress.