Commit Access

After someone has successfully contributed a few non-trivial patches, some committer, usually whoever has reviewed and applied the most patches from that contributor, proposes them for commit access. This proposal is sent only to the other full committers -- the ensuing discussion is private, so that everyone can feel comfortable speaking their minds. Assuming there are no objections, the contributor is granted commit access. The decision is made by consensus; there are no formal rules governing the procedure, though generally if someone strongly objects the access is not offered, or is offered on a provisional basis.

The primary criterion for full commit access is good judgment.

You do not have to be a technical wizard, or demonstrate deep knowledge of the entire codebase, to become a committer. You just need to know what you don't know. If your patches adhere to the guidelines ,adhere to all the usual unquantifiable rules of coding (code should be readable, robust, maintainable, etc.), and respect the Hippocratic Principle of "first, do no harm", then you will probably get commit access pretty quickly. The size, complexity, and quantity of your patches do not matter as much as the degree of care you show in avoiding bugs and minimizing unnecessary impact on the rest of the code. Many committers are people who have not made major code contributions, but rather lots of small, clean fixes, each of which was an unambiguous improvement to the code. (Of course, this does not mean the project needs a bunch of very trivial patches whose only purpose is to gain commit access; knowing what's worth a patch post and what's not is part of showing good judgement :-) .)