Create GOVERNANCE.md

[kajarnocom]

Initial content, with pointers to two sub-files – to reside in the governance/ subdirectory

[ericherman]

Nice to see such a quick response to https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-23951

There is an existing "Docs" directory, but I think a new "governance" directory for the supporting "Foundation_bylaws.md" and "Board_Member_expectations.md" would also be good.

[ottok]

Related: Github has built-in support for CODEOWNERS, a file where you can define "governance" in the sense that who is expected to be responsible for that parts of the codebase, and who will by default be the suggested reviewer for changes to files in those paths. See https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/1650/files

[ottok]

See also: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/building-a-strong-community/setting-up-your-project-for-healthy-contributions

There are certain magic files, such as CONTRIBUTING, CODE_OF_CONDUCT, SUPPORT, FUNDING, SECURITY etc (in addition the CODEOWNERS mentioned above).

[robertbindar]

Related: Github has built-in support for CODEOWNERS, a file where you can define "governance" in the sense that who is expected to be responsible for that parts of the codebase, and who will by default be the suggested reviewer for changes to files in those paths. See https://github.com/MariaDB/server/pull/1650/files

Hi @ottok and thanks for pushing for this, I believe it is really important to use GitHub at its full potential for our repositories. I think this is out of scope for this PR, but there is an ongoing effort to introduce the magic files you mentioned above and also to offer some more Markdown love to our server/ repository, stay tuned.

[LinuxJedi]

So that we can get the communication in the PR moving again and come to a resolution for it.

@ottok and @kajarnocom do we think the solution for this particular PR is to rename this file CODEOWNERS.md and potentially add stub files that for now can just say "coming soon" or something in the governance directory until that can be contributed in a separate PR?

I'm happy to make this change and put it into 10.11 if we are in agreement. We can then work on the content of the other files if it does not already exist.

[ericherman]

Hello @LinuxJedi !

I would not use the name CODEOWNERS.md for anything that is not a file in the format expected by GitHub.

I believe that a CODEOWNERS file covers expertise of committers rather than codebase or project "governance".

Yes, a committer process which automatically requests reviews from the experts on particular files is great, but not the same scope as codebase/project governance.

As such, I'd suggest that it would be better to move this forward by making a separate MDEV for CODEOWNERS support, rather than expand the scope of MDEV-23951 and this PR.

Perhaps worth considering is that the CNF Graduation Criteria clearly distinguishes these two related concepts:

Explicitly define a project governance and committer process. The committer process should cover the full committer lifecycle including onboarding and offboarding or emeritus criteria. This preferably is laid out in a GOVERNANCE.md file and references an OWNERS.md file showing the current and emeritus committers.

Regardless, I like your proposal to build the related parts up incrementally -- perhaps including stub files -- and moving this forward again.