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 and/or Homebrew/homebrew-cask. Let us know which 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 for any changes in the Homebrew repositories (instead
  of committing directly) and don't merge them unless you get at least one approval
  and passing tests.
- Please review the Maintainer Guidelines at https://docs.brew.sh/Maintainer-Guidelines
- Please review the team-specific guides for whichever teams you will be a part of.
  Here are links to these guides:
    - Homebrew/brew: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-brew-Maintainer-Guide
    - Homebrew/homebrew-core: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-homebrew-core-Maintainer-Guide
    - Homebrew/linuxbrew-core: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-linuxbrew-core-Maintainer-Guide
    - Homebrew/homebrew-cask: https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-homebrew-cask-Maintainer-Guide
- 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/Maintainer-Guidelines
    - the team-specific guides linked above and in the 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:

Invite them to the @Homebrew/maintainers team (or any relevant subteams) to give them write access to relevant repositories (but don’t make them owners). They will need to enable GitHub’s Two Factor Authentication.
Invite them to the machomebrew private maintainers Slack (and ensure they’ve read the communication guidelines) and ask them to use their real name there (rather than a pseudonym they may use on e.g. GitHub).
Ask them to disable SMS as a 2FA device or fallback on their GitHub account in favour of using one of the other authentication methods.
Ask them to (regularly) review remove any unneeded GitHub personal access tokens.
Start the process to add them as Homebrew members, for formal voting rights and the ability to hold office for Homebrew.

If they are interested in doing system administration work:

Invite them to the homebrew private 1Password.
Optionally: make them owners on the Homebrew GitHub organisation if they need to access organisation-wide settings (like GitHub Actions organisation shared runners).

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

Email their name, email and employer to the Software Freedom Conservancy at homebrew@sfconservancy.org
Make them owners on the Homebrew GitHub organisation
Invite them to the @Homebrew/plc team
Invite them to Google Analytics.
Invite them to the homebrew private 1Password.
Make them owners on the machomebrew private maintainers Slack.

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

In the 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.

When admitted as members:

Invite them to the @Homebrew/members team, to give them access to the private governance repository.
Invite them as a single-channel guest to the #members channel on the machomebrew private maintainers Slack (and ensure they’ve read the communication guidelines) and ask them to use their real name there (rather than a pseudonym they may use on e.g. GitHub).
Add them to the membership list in the homebrew-governance repository.

Homebrew Documentation

New Maintainer Checklist

Members