Please welcome Jan Beulich as Xen committer & revisions to Xen governance

[Lars Kurth <lars.kurth-LM2mM/qkH7s@public.gmane.org>]

Dear Xen developers,

I wanted to announce that Jan Beulich has been nominated for as Xen 
Hypervisor committer and confirmed by vote by the other Xen committers 
(which are Keir Fraser, Tim Deegan and Ian Jackson).

Jan's Contribution
==================
Jan has made a tremendous contribution to the project over the years and 
was was one of the top 3 contributors to the project for several years. 
Just to quote a few stats
- 2009 : 107 patches changing 11746 lines of code
- 2010 : 147 patches changing 7613 lines of code
- 2011 : 204 patches changing 2655 lines of code

Congratulations!

I do have to apologize that we did not entirely follow the new 
governance process as described at 
http://www.xen.org/projects/governance.html due to an oversight. The 
nomination and vote was meant to happen in public, but has happened in 
private amongst the existing committers. We will do better next time. 
This exercise has also shown some bugs in the process which need fixing.

Bugs in the Process
===================
See http://www.xen.org/projects/governance.html)

Committer vs. Maintainers: The process talks about maintainers as if 
they were committers and mixes some aspects of both roles. This is 
incorrect.

PROPOSED FIXES:
- Split the role into two
- What is a maintainer?
   - A maintainer owns one or several component in the Xen tree
   - A maintainer reviews and approves changes that affect their component
   - Note that some components will be owned by several maintainers (in 
that case consensus
     decision making applies)
   - Election: new maintainers are nominated and voted for by other 
maintainers
- What is a committer?
   - A maintainer with write access to the code tree
   - The committer acts on the wishes of the maintainers and applies 
changes approved
     by the respective maintainer(s).
   - Helps resolve disagreements between maintainers of the same 
component should they arise
   - Election: new committers are nominated and voted for only by other 
committers
- Allow a committer to be a sponsor for a new Xen.org project
- Reflect above changes in Elections
- I believe we should keep "Project Lead Elections" as it is
   (We could restrict elections to committers, but in practice 
committers will have a
    much higher chance to be elected. I believe we should leave things 
as they are.)

Please let me know your views, by responding to this thread. If there 
are no objections by next friday, Oct 7th, we will just update the 
document. And then give another week for additional discussion and the 
change will be considered approved.

Regards
Lars