There are several roles within the Airflow Open-Source community.
For detailed information for each role, see: Committers and PMC members.
The outline for this document in GitHub is available at top-right corner button (with 3-dots and 3 lines).
The PMC (Project Management Committee) is a group of maintainers that drives changes in the way that Airflow is managed as a project.
Considering Apache, the role of the PMC member is primarily to ensure that Airflow conforms to Apache's processes and guidelines.
You will often see the term "committer" or "maintainer" in the context of the Airflow project. This is a person who has write access to the Airflow repository and can merge pull requests. Committers (also known as maintainers) are also responsible for reviewing pull requests and guiding contributors to make their first contribution. They are also responsible for making sure that the project is moving forward and that the quality of the code is maintained.
The term "committer" and "maintainer" is used interchangeably. The term "committer" is the official term used by the Apache Software Foundation, while "maintainer" is more commonly used in the Open Source community and is used in context of GitHub in a number of guidelines and documentation, so this document will mostly use "maintainer", when speaking about Github, Pull Request, Github Issues and Discussions. On the other hand, "committer" is more often used in devlist discussions, official communications, Airflow website and every time when we formally refer to the role.
The official list of committers can be found here.
Additionally, committers are listed in a few other places (some of these may only be visible to existing committers):
- https://whimsy.apache.org/roster/committee/airflow
- https://github.com/orgs/apache/teams/airflow-committers/members
Committers are responsible for:
- Championing one or more items on the Roadmap
- Reviewing & Merging Pull-Requests
- Scanning and responding to GitHub issues
- Responding to questions on the dev mailing list (dev@airflow.apache.org)
The task of release managers is to prepare and release Airflow artifacts (airflow, providers, Helm Chart, Python client. The release managers are usually PMC members and the process of releasing is described in the dev documentation where we keep information and tools used for releasing.
A contributor is anyone who wants to contribute code, documentation, tests, ideas, or anything to the Apache Airflow project.
Contributors are responsible for:
- Fixing bugs
- Adding features
- Championing one or more items on the Roadmap.
Security issues in Airflow are handled by the Airflow Security Team. The team consists of selected PMC members that are interested in looking at, discussing and fixing security issues, but it can also include committers and non-committer contributors that are not PMC members yet and have been approved by the PMC members in a vote. You can request to be added to the team by sending a message to private@airflow.apache.org. However, the team should be small and focused on solving security issues, so the requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and the team size will be kept relatively small, limited to only actively security-focused contributors.
There are certain expectations from the members of the security team:
- They are supposed to be active in assessing, discussing, fixing and releasing the security issues in Airflow. While it is perfectly understood that as volunteers, we might have periods of lower activity, prolonged lack of activity and participation will result in removal from the team, pending PMC decision (the decision on removal can be taken by LAZY CONSENSUS among all the PMC members on private@airflow.apache.org mailing list).
- They are not supposed to reveal the information about pending and unfixed security issues to anyone (including their employers) unless specifically authorized by the security team members, specifically if diagnosing and solving the issue might involve the need of external experts - for example security experts that are available through Airflow stakeholders. The intent about involving 3rd parties has to be discussed and agreed upon at security@airflow.apache.org.
- They have to have an ICLA signed with Apache Software Foundation.
- The security team members might inform 3rd parties about fixes, for example in order to assess if the fix is solving the problem or in order to assess its applicability to be applied by 3rd parties, as soon as a PR solving the issue is opened in the public airflow repository.
- In case of critical security issues, the members of the security team might iterate on a fix in a private repository and only open the PR in the public repository once the fix is ready to be released, with the intent of minimizing the time between the fix being available and the fix being released. In this case the PR might be sent to review and comment to the PMC members on private list, in order to request an expedited voting on the release. The voting for such release might be done on the private@airflow.apache.org mailing list and should be made public at the dev@apache.airflow.org mailing list as soon as the release is ready to be announced.
- The security team members working on the fix might be mentioned as remediation developers in the CVE including their job affiliation if they want to.
- Community members acting as release managers are by default members of the security team and unless they want to, they do not have to be involved in discussing and solving the issues. They are responsible for releasing the CVE information (announcement and publishing to security indexes) as part of the release process. This is facilitated by the security tool provided by the Apache Software Foundation.
- Severity of the issue is determined based on the criteria described in the Severity Rating blog post by the Apache Software Foundation Security team.
Handling security issues is something of a chore, it takes vigilance, requires quick reaction and responses and often requires to act outside of the regular "day" job. This means that not everyone can keep up with being part of the security team for long while being engaged and active. While we do not expect all the security team members to be active all the time, and - since we are volunteers, it's perfectly understandable that work, personal life, family and generally life might not help with being active. And this is not a considered as being failure, it's more stating the fact of life.
Also prolonged time of being exposed to handling "other's" problems and discussing similar kinds of problem and responses might be tiring and might lead to burnout.
However, for those who have never done that before, participation in the security team might be an interesting experience and a way to learn a lot about security and security issue handling. We have a lot of established processes and tools that make the work of the security team members easier, so this can be treated as a great learning experience for some community members. And knowing that this is not a "lifetime" assignment, but rather a temporary engagement might make it easier for people to decide to join the security team.
That's why we've introduced rotation of the security team members.
Periodically - every 3-4 months (depending on actual churn of the security issues that are reported to us), we re-evaluate the engagement and activity of the security team members, and we ask them if they want to continue being part of the security team, taking into account their engagement since the last team refinement. Generally speaking if the engagement during the last period was marginal, the person is considered as a candidate for removing from the team and it requires a deliberate confirmation of re-engagement to take the person off-the-list.
At the same time we open up the possibility to other people in the community to join the team and make a "call for new security team members" where community members can volunteer to join the security team. Such volunteering should happen on the private@ list. The current members of the security team as well as PMC members can also nominate other community members to join the team and those new team members have to be well recognized and trusted by the community and accepted by the PMC.
The proposal of team refinement is passed to the PMC as LAZY CONSENSUS (or VOTE if consensus cannot be reached). In case the consensus cannot be reached for the whole list, we can split it and ask for lazy consensus for each person separately.
You can follow this with the How to communicate document to learn more how to communicate with the Airflow community members.