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 for a long time 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 fixing user-reported issues, resolving any
issues that arise from your code in a timely fashion and reviewing user
contributions. You should also be making contributions to Homebrew every month
unless you are ill or on vacation (and please let another maintainer know if
that's the case so we're aware you won't be able to help while you are out).
You will need to watch 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. GitX 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:
- 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.
- Ask them to sign in to Bintray using their GitHub account and they should auto-sync to Bintray’s Homebrew organisation as a member so they can publish new bottles.
- Add them to the Jenkins’ GitHub Authorization Settings admin user names so they can adjust settings and restart jobs.
- Add them to the Jenkins’ GitHub Pull Request Builder admin list to enable
@BrewTestBot test this pleasefor them. - Invite them to the
homebrew-maintainersprivate maintainers mailing list. - Invite them to the
machomebrewprivate maintainers Slack (and ensure they’ve read the communication guidelines). - 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.
- Add them to Homebrew/brew’s README.
If they are also interested in doing system administration work:
- Invite them to the
homebrew-opsprivate operations mailing list. - Invite them to the
homebrewprivate 1Password.
If they want to consume raw anonymous aggregate analytics data (rather than use brew formula-analytics):
- Invite them to Google Analytics.
Once they have been active maintainers for at least a year and had some activity on more than one Homebrew organisation repository (or one repository and helped with system administration work):
- Homebrew’s Software Freedom Conservancy Project Leadership Committee can take a vote on whether to extend an offer to the maintainer to join the committee. If they accept, email their name, email and employer to homebrew@sfconservancy.org, make them owners on the Homebrew GitHub organisation and add them to the relevant section of the Homebrew/brew’s README.
If there are problems, ask them to step down as a maintainer and revoke their access to all of the above.
Now sit back, relax and let the new maintainers handle more of our contributions.
