DeveloperWiki:Governance And Decision Making
Governance and Decision Making
This page describes the governance model used by official contributors to the Arch Linux distribution, including the role of the leader and the process by which decisions are made.
Core Tenets
The Arch Linux distribution is a volunteer-based effort which relies on its contributors' motivation, free time and hard work. To facilitate contributions, its governance model strives to be as simple and frictionless as possible.
Its core tenets are that:
- Anyone should be free to contribute to any aspect of the distribution.
- Decisions concerning a particular project should be made by people actively involved in that project.
Projects are thus led by the contributors involved in almost complete autonomy. Only when an issue arises among project contributors or when the directions of two projects conflict, is the process below required.
General decision-making process
The general process to resolve an issue is as follows:
- The issue is discussed on the relevant mailing list. If this discussion reaches consensus, the corresponding decision is made.
- If (and only if) consensus cannot be reached, the leader makes the final decision.
Each category of official contributors is free to adopt a different process than the above to resolve internal matters; they are mentioned below where applicable. Issues of concern to more than one category must be resolved using the general process above.
Categories of official contributors
Official contributors to the Arch Linux distribution are split in four mutually non exclusive categories:
The Project Leader
The leader's main roles are to:
- Represent Arch Linux in a legal capacity. For instance, they act as contact for SPI, approve expenses, enforce our trademark, etc.
- Make the final decision when (and only when) the community is unable to resolve an issue using the process described above.
See DeveloperWiki:Project Leader for further information on these roles and on the project leader election process.
Developers
They maintain the core and extra package repositories in addition to doing any other developer duties.
Decisions on issues specific to developers, including developer addition and removal, are made according to the general process above.
Package maintainers
They are responsible for moderating the Arch User Repository and jointly with the Developers they are in charge of the extra repository.
Decisions on issues specific to package maintainers, including package maintainers addition and removal, are made according to the Package Maintainer Bylaws.
Support Staff
Consists of indispensable people in a wide variety of roles. They keep the infrastructure for the distribution and its community running smoothly.
They include:
- Forum moderators
- Wiki administrators
- IRC moderators
- Bugwranglers
- Security team members