Since the beginning of this year, there have been 15 nominations on the nixpkgs commiters interest list, none of which were yet addressed by the committer delegation team, and it has been over three months since the team engaged in the issue at all. Among these nominations are quite a few that I would consider a great addition (by which I am not referring to my own self-nomination).
I do not want to blame the people behind the committer delegation team for this, who are doing a great service to the project in so many regards already.
I think we have to come to terms that the current process is failing us, raising the question what better alternative could be established.
A good example to investigate might be the Arch Linux Package Maintainer Bylaws.
An Arch Package Maintainer (historically referred to as Trusted User) is essentially comparable to nixpkgs committers.
In their bylaws, they define the Standard Voting Procedure, which is also the means by which new package maintainers are added:
The addition of a Package Maintainer may occur at any time.
In order to become a Package Maintainer, one must first find two sponsoring Package Maintainers following the guidelines outlined below, and arrange privately with them to announce their candidacy on the aur-general mailing list. Following the announcement, standard voting procedure commences with a discussion period of 14 days, a quorum of 66%, and a voting period of 7 days.
SVP( addition_of_Package_Maintainer, 14, 0.66, 7 );If a candidate is rejected by SVP, they may not reapply to become a Package Maintainer for a period of three months.
These bylaws lay down a clear time frame in which nominations must be discussed and voted on, and also the quorum that has to be reached for the nomination to be successful. A similar process is applied for the removal of active maintainers (inactive maintainers are removed automatically), and for altering these rules and quorums (although we already have the RFC process for this).
Ultimately this would have to become an RFC to be established, but I think it makes sense to discuss the situation and possible alternative solutions here before.
