Re: Git Project Leadership Committee

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 19, 2018, 12:22 UTC
Message-ID: <87zhxipmv9.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180816224138.GA15490@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Thu, Aug 16 2018, Jeff King wrote:

>  - Christian Couder
>  - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

Thanks for the nomination. I'm happy to help the project by serving on the leadership committee if you'll have me.

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> Both are active, have been around a long time, and have taken part in
> non-code activities and governance discussions. My understanding is that
> Christian freelances on Git, which doesn't quite fit my "volunteer
> representative" request, but I think contracting on Git is its own
> interesting perspective to represent (and certainly he spent many years
> on the volunteer side).

I'd say I'd mostly be a "volunteer representative", but in the interest of full disclosure here's the extent to which I'm not.

I'm involved in internal Git infrastructure at my employer, Booking.com, and some of the the work I do on git is company sponsored, since it happens to be stuff Booking.com needs from git. E.g. my recent fetch.fsck.* series is one example of that, as well as the "fetch.pruneTags" option in 2.17.

Booking.com doesn't really have any sort of git.git infrastructure team in the sense that Microsoft & GitHub do. I'm on the team which, among other things, manages our internal GitLab installation and git-related things in general.

I'm trusted to spend company time on patching git when that's the easiest or best way to accomplish some task. Usually I don't even discuss the specifics of that with anyone, I just go ahead and do it.

I'm not aware of Booking.com, or its parent company Booking Holdings (or sister companies) in any way being involved in any business model that involves Git (unlike say GitHub, Atlassian etc).

So I can't imagine any situation where I'd need to recuse myself due to real or perceived conflict of interest, but would of course do so if there was even the appearance of impropriety.

Booking.com has also had a contract with Christian Couder to work on things in git.git since 2015-ish. E.g. the rebase speedups Christian did and the ongoing work on reftables is paid for by Booking.com.

During this time I've been the person tasked with managing the work that Christian is doing on git.git for Booking.com, in a very loose sense of "managing". It's usually just e.g. "hey rebase performance kind of sucks, can you work on it?" "sure!".

I know Christian also does contract work for GitLab, e.g. I understand that his delta island integration work these days is done on their behalf, but I'll let him provide details on that or any other corporate entanglements he may have to the extent he feels it's relevant.