New Maintainer Checklist

This is a guide used by existing maintainers to invite new maintainers. You might find it interesting but there’s nothing here users should have to know.

There’s someone who has been making consistently high-quality contributions to Homebrew and shown themselves able to make slightly more advanced contributions than just e.g. formula updates? Let’s invite them to be a maintainer!

First, send them the invitation email:

The Homebrew team and I really appreciate your help on issues, pull requests and
your contributions to Homebrew.

We would like to invite you to have commit access and be a Homebrew maintainer.
If you agree to be a maintainer, you should spend a significant proportion of
the time you are working on Homebrew applying and self-merging widely used
changes (e.g. version updates), triaging, fixing and debugging user-reported
issues, or reviewing user pull requests. You should also be making contributions
to Homebrew at least once per quarter.

You should watch or regularly check Homebrew/brew and/or
Homebrew/homebrew-core. Let us know which (or both) so we can grant you commit
access appropriately.

If you're no longer able to perform all of these tasks, please continue to
contribute to Homebrew, but we will ask you to step down as a maintainer.

A few requests:

- Please make pull requests on any changes to Homebrew/brew code or any
  non-trivial (e.g. not a test or audit improvement or version bump) changes
  to formulae code and don't merge them unless you get at least one approval
  and passing tests.
- Use `brew pull` for formulae changes that require new bottles or change
  multiple formulae and let it auto-close issues wherever possible (it may
  take ~5m). When this isn't necessary use GitHub's "Merge pull request"
  button in "create a merge commit" mode for Homebrew/brew or "squash and
  merge" for a single formulae change. If in doubt, check with e.g. Fork.app
  that you've not accidentally added merge commits.
- Still create your branches on your fork rather than in the main repository.
  Note GitHub's UI will create edits and reverts on the main repository if you
  make edits or click "Revert" on the Homebrew/brew repository rather than your
  own fork.
- If still in doubt please ask for help and we'll help you out.
- Please read:
    - https://docs.brew.sh/Brew-Test-Bot-For-Core-Contributors
    - https://docs.brew.sh/Maintainer-Guidelines
    - anything else you haven't read on https://docs.brew.sh

How does that sound?

Thanks for all your work so far!

If they accept, follow a few steps to get them set up:

If they are interested in doing system administration work or Homebrew/brew releases:

If they are elected to the Homebrew’s Project Leadership Committee:

If there are problems, ask them to step down as a maintainer and revoke their access to all of the above.

In interests of loosely verifying maintainer identity and building camaraderie, if you find yourself in the same town (e.g living, visiting or at a conference) as another Homebrew maintainer you should make the effort to meet up. If you do so, you can expense your meal (within SFC reimbursable expense policies. This is a more relaxed version of similar policies used by other projects, e.g. the Debian system to meet in person to sign keys with legal ID verification.

Now sit back, relax and let the new maintainers handle more of our contributions.

Members

People who are either not eligible or willing to be Homebrew maintainers but have shown continued involvement in the Homebrew community may be admitted by a majority vote of the Project Leadership Committee to join the Homebrew GitHub organisation as members.

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