A committer is an individual who is permitted to modify the
source code of a software project,
that will be used in the project's official
releases. To contribute source code to most large software projects, one must make modifications and then "commit" those changes to a central
version control system, such as
Git (or
CVS
CVS may refer to:
Organizations
* CVS Health, a US pharmacy chain
** CVS Pharmacy
** CVS Caremark, a prescription benefit management subsidiary
* Council for Voluntary Service, England
* Cable Video Store, former US pay-per-view service
* CVS F ...
).
In
open-source software development, the committer role may be used to distinguish commit access, a specific type of responsibility, from other forms of contribution, such as
triaging issues or organizing events. Typically, an author submits a
software patch containing changes and a committer integrates the patch into the main code base of the project.
Commit bit
To have a "commit bit" on one's user account means that the user is permitted to contribute source code changes. This dates to the use of a literal
binary digit to represent yes-or-no privileges in access control systems of legacy
version control and
software system
A software system is a system of intercommunicating components based on software forming part of a computer system (a combination of hardware and software). It "consists of a number of separate programs, configuration files, which are used to se ...
s, such as
BSD.
The commit bit represents the
permission to contribute to the shared code of a
software project. It can be resigned or may be removed due to inactivity in the project, as dormant committer accounts can represent security risks.
Common responsibilities
Project committers are usually the lead developers of a project and are the ones responsible for the majority of changes. They are seen as trusted, responsible and reliable members of the project's community. Relatedly, committers are usually responsible for the review of
patches submitted by members of the community for inclusion into the software. After a successful review, usually consisting of conformance to coding standards and ensuring it does not introduce any new bugs, the committer will commit that specific patch on behalf of the patch submitter.
Becoming a committer
The process to becoming a committer can vary across projects, but in general, there are three common ways to do it.
# Be one of the original developers
# Be appointed by one of the original developers
# Be successfully voted in by the community of committers
Becoming a committer in an existing project often involves becoming active on both the
mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...
s as well as with supplying
patches. After enough involvement, the other committers can then vote you in as a new committer. This normally happens through an
e-mail vote. The XML-SOAP project hosted at Apache.org is an example of this process.
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/xml-soap-dev/200006.mbox/%[email protected]%3e]
References
{{reflist
Free software culture and documents
Version control