Committer's Guide

To participate in an Apache project, you start as contributor by contributing patches, participating in the mail discussions, thereby earning merit. The PMC (Project Management Committee) will acknowledge the motivation and invite you as committer. A committer has write access to the repos.
If you think about the project as such, you will soon be invited to join the PMC. Being PMC basically means you must vote on releases and help define the direction of the project.

Before becoming a committer

As a contributor you submit changes and a committer checks them for validity before adding them to the repo. As a committer you do not need to ask first (even though we all often do) but can update the repo as you wish, therefore you need to be registered with the Apache Software Foundation. This is done by submitting a ICLA. The ICLA acknowledges that all your contributions are under the Apache License (ALv2): this guarantees that the project is free and open source and that code can be freely reused by anyone.
As part of the ICLA you must choose an Apache userid, check the list of Apache committers, and non-committers with ICLAs on record (you can find them all here
In Corinthia we have decided that, at least during the incubation phase, all committers are also PMC members (PPMC members during incubation), to avoid a 2 class community, so when you are invited it will be as committer and PPMC, of course you can choose not to accept at all or only accept being committer.

Being a committer/PMC

You have earned merit by contributing and are now recognized as a person who contributes positively to the project. Please use your new karma carefully, even though you can update the repo directly it is good to discuss bigger changes first, especially changes in API and other parts used by others. We use dev@ intensively to discuss changes, and first when we have consensus these bigger changes are integrated.
The most important part is to have fun, working on/with corinthia is not work!

Rules of thumb

• Every contribution is a piece of intellectual property. Please treat it with respect.
• Preserve both the name and email address. This is the precious sustenance that nourishes our project.
• Ensure your name and email address are there as the committer prior to pushing it to the Apache repositories.
• Always give credit where it is due, ensure every merged commit reflects the individual who authored that commit.

Setting up your repository

Clone the canonical ASF repo using this command:

We highly recommend that you do your work in a local branch, and the merge it to master with --squash before committing to the remote repo. This allows you to make as many small commits as you like, while all the others only see your final commit
You can read more about the use of GIT in our GIT FAQ