Clarification of Committer rules in GOVERNANCE

[MichaelChirico]

Hi @Rdatatable/committers,

#6428 has me wondering if we might need some clarification in the wording here:

data.table/GOVERNANCE.md

Line 66 in 7445df7

* How to obtain this role: after a reviewer has a consistent history of careful reviews of others' PRs, then a current Committer should ask all other current Committers if they approve promoting the Reviewer to Committer, and it should be done if there is Consensus among active Committers.

In particular, I sense there is some tension with the role of Project Member:

data.table/GOVERNANCE.md

Line 52 in 7445df7

* Definition: some one who has submitted at least one PR with substantial contributions, that has been merged into master. PRs improving documentation are welcome, and substantial contributions to the docs should count toward membership, but minor contributions such as spelling fixes do not count toward membership.

Basically, as of now someone could, say, do exclusively reviews of minor copy-editing changes and still qualify as Committer.

I think we should require reviews of the same type of "substantial contributions" that qualify for Membership.

Possible updated wording:

-after a reviewer has a consistent history of careful reviews of others' PRs
+after a reviewer has a consistent history of careful reviews of others' substantial PRs

Possibly, we could add a call-out elsewhere in the document (not sure exactly where) defining "substantial". See also #6750 which would help clarify message translation itself wouldn't count, though it's easily possible to make contributions in the translation space that are substantial.

[tdhock]

that is a good point about "substantial"

[venom1204]

@MichaelChirico can i work on it ?

if yes then i am thinking to include the change you proposed and adding a definition of substantial pr just below it to make it easy for others to understand what it includes ?

[MichaelChirico]

Thanks for volunteering @venom1204, but I would leave this one to existing maintainers who have more context to be able to define 'substantial' in our setting.

[venom1204]

yah sounds good.