What is a Harper Committer

As Harper continues to grow, it’s important to build a team of people capable of making changes within the project. This shares responsibility and avoids bottlenecking progress on a single person. For this purpose, the project has Harper Committers, who are entrusted with elevated privileges within the project and community.

What a Harper Committer can do

All patches (or “pull requests” in GitHub’s terminology) need to be reviewed and approved by at least one committer before they can be merged. Patches that edit or introduce rules and patches that include only safe bug fixes must be reviewed by at least one committer, even if that committer is also the author. In other words, committers may merge any PR, even their own, as long as it fits that criteria. More complex patches must be reviewed by the project owner (Elijah Potter) specifically.

Committers are also given special administrative permissions in the various official online forums the Harper project runs, including the Discord server.

Committers do not have permission to publish releases or set policy.

How to Become a Harper Committer

At this time, Elijah Potter, the project lead, maintains the team of Harper Committers at his discretion. Other Harper Committers are encouraged to endorse an individual to be included, which greatly increases the chances of that person being added to the team. The best way to be considered is to be active! As all Harper Committers will have a background of activity and impact within the project.

Practical steps for consideration may include:

• The applicant has submitted more than or equal to 15 pull requests which have been approved by a committer and merged into a Harper release.
• The applicant is in good standing with the community, helping newcomers navigate the pull request process and pushing people in the right direction.
• An existing committer is willing to personally vouch that the applicant has the qualities of someone who would support the project as a committer.

Maintaining Harper Committer Status

Harper Committers do not need to do anything special to maintain their status. Being honest, helpful, and acting in the interest of Harper’s mission is good enough. Harper Committers do not need to actively commit to maintain their status.

As mentioned above, Elijah Potter is responsible for maintaining and growing the Harper Committer team and therefore may remove members at his discretion. As a note, if a Harper Committer goes inactive for an extended period, their status may be removed for security purposes, and may simply be reinstated upon return.