Organisation

Original pre-text

With the goal of lessening the likeliness of pull requests being left hanging around, making it clearer who knows what, giving more motivation via responsibility and change for the sake of change, Minetest's organization update of 2014-01-02:

Core developers

Core developers have special privileges and responsibilities compared to other contributors:

• Can vote for and against merging pull requests (or if being the subsystem's maintainer, can directly decide)
• Has write access to the minetest team's repositories on github
• If assigned a subsystem, should take care of it (doh)

Core developers are assigned and unassigned by celeron55, based on these rules:

• Only people who have already contributed to the project can be assigned to be core developers.
• The person themselves or anyone else can propose someone to become a core developer. Do this by "/msg celeron55 blah blah".
• If a core developer is not active and constructive, they will be unassigned. ^{(active = doing something productive) (constructive = not simply blocking everything that comes their way) (There is no way to make this not vague; celeron55 will accept complaints and will ultimately decide.)}
• If a core developer does not have time for doing anything, their tasks will be explicitly moved to be done by someone else.

Subsystem maintainers

The engine is split into virtual "subsystems" based on the most easily definable but still meaningful parts of the code (mostly each file should belong to one subsystem, but this is not strictly possible).

Each subsystem is allocated to one core developer, who then becomes a "subsystem maintainer", who is responsible for making sure pull requests get handled and fixing the subsystem if it doesn't work. Subsystem maintainers are trusted to give their permissions and/or responsibiltiies to someone else too if they see fit.

Subsystem maintainers can be proposed to the core team by anyone (preferably by themselves or by the previous one), and they are not-so-officially majority voted. The person on "maintainer conflicts" can turn down proposals on the basis of wrong direction or too much controversy (as rarely as possible).

The old rule of merging if two core developers agree still stays valid. It is useful in cases when the appropriate maintainer is away or does not have time.

Github

Each issue and pull request should be assigned to a subsystem using the appropriate section label. For example, pull request #7 would get the label "Section - Build".

Subsystems

Developer	Subsystem
celeron55	maintainer conflicts
sapier	server/client/env
kahrl	startup/config/util
ShadowNinja	script API
hmmmm	mapgen
celeron55	client/audiovisuals
sapier	low-level network
[OPEN]	build system
[OPEN]	masterserver
ShadowNinja	Documentation
[OPEN]	Translation

Subsystem Files

(TODO)

Maintainer conflicts

Meta-subsystem with the task of resolving conflicts between other subsystem maintainers that they can't solve themselves.

Proposed

These can be created if people who are interested in taking reponsibility of such things join the project.

Proposed: releases

Meta-subsystem with the task of maintaining a reasonable release schedule by deciding when to do it, what is missing and announcing feature freezes and poking the necessary people to make it happen. The most important tasks are to make sure every subsystem maintainer knows when there is a feature freeze and when there is not, and to manage the tags and branches on github.

Proposed: voting/community

Meta-subsystem with the task of figuring out and remembering what the community wants by reading discussions and arranging votings, and being a source of that kind of information to developers who want to focus on developing.