[OpenAFS-announce] OpenAFS Project Update: New Maintainers Join the Team

[Benjamin Kaduk]

I have been happy to serve as OpenAFS Guardian for almost ten years now, but
in recent years it has become clear that as the sole Guardian, my
availability has become a bottleneck that is slowing down the progress of
the project.  While I plan to continue my work on the project at the current
level, I'm excited to welcome Andrew Deason and Michael Meffie to join me as
maintainers of the OpenAFS project; the three of us will share
responsibility for reviewing and approving changes submitted by all
contributors through the Gerrit Code Review system.

Andrew and Michael have been long-time contributors to OpenAFS, and I
welcome their expertise as we jointly maintain the health and development of
the project.  To help Andrew and Michael step into in their new roles and
maintain the high quality of code changes we've seen in recent years, I've
written up guidance on how to do code review for the project (which is going
through our usual code review process as changes to the CODING file), and we've
jointly agreed on the process that we will follow for approving and merging
changes to the tree.

What is Changing:

* We're documenting and managing the process for OpenAFS Maintainers on the
  public OpenAFS wiki: https://wiki.openafs.org/devel/MaintainersApproval/

* The new maintainers have been granted access in Gerrit to approve changes
  with a +2 review, and merge approved changes to the master and stable branches.

What is Staying the Same:

* Our workflow remains unchanged: all changes must be merged onto the 'master'
  branch before being considered for backporting to the current stable branch.

* The Release Team will continue to meet weekly on IRC to discuss changes
  required for the stable releases.

What to Expect:

* A forthcoming "Contributor Guide" will provide improved guidance on how to
  contribute and review code on Gerrit.

* Many old gerrit changes will see new activity as we try to focus our
  initial efforts to review and accept existing fixes that have yet to be
  merged.

* With the increase in maintainer time, we anticipate that the rate of code
  acceptance into the OpenAFS codebase will eventually stabilize at a more
  rapid cadence, allowing for bug fixes and improvements to be merged more
  quickly.
                                                                                                              

Please join me in welcoming Andrew and Michael to their new roles!  I look
forward to seeing the positive impact they will have on the project.

Best regards,
Ben Kaduk