Add policy for maintainer takeover of stale PRs#159
Add policy for maintainer takeover of stale PRs#159chrishenzie wants to merge 1 commit intocontainerd:mainfrom
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Adds a section to the contributing guide outlining the process for maintainers to take over stale pull requests. This ensures valuable contributions are not lost when an author becomes unresponsive, while preserving original author credit and providing transparency on modifications, as discussed at the 2026 containerd Maintainer Summit. Assisted-by: Antigravity Signed-off-by: Chris Henzie <chrishenzie@gmail.com>
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| ## Maintainer Takeover of Stale Pull Requests | ||
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| The containerd project values the effort that contributors put into pull requests. However, life priorities change, and sometimes a contributor may become unresponsive before a pull request is fully ready to be merged. |
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The rest of this file is wrapped at about 80 characters. Can you fix the change here to also wrap?
| * **Audit Trail**: The maintainer will add a note in the commit message, typically enclosed in square brackets just before their own `Signed-off-by` tag, explaining what they modified. For example: | ||
| ```text | ||
| Signed-off-by: Original Contributor <contributor@example.com> | ||
| [maintainer@example.com: fixed checkpatch errors and resolved merge conflict] |
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I don't think we've really done this before. We could add a pointer to the original PR and then diff instead?
| In such cases, we follow a practice inspired by the [Linux kernel contribution guidelines](https://docs.kernel.org/maintainer/modifying-patches.html): | ||
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| * **Authorship Preservation**: The maintainer will preserve the original author's identity in the commit history (e.g., keeping them as the commit author or using `Co-authored-by`). | ||
| * **Audit Trail**: The maintainer will add a note in the commit message, typically enclosed in square brackets just before their own `Signed-off-by` tag, explaining what they modified. For example: |
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Is the suggestion to amend commits of another author?
I'd prefer to cherry-pick those as is and follow up with whatever work needed.
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I'd probably leave this open to maintainer preference/case-by-case basis. For things where there's a fairly major change, adding new commits makes a lot of sense. For nits (variable names, error messages, small things like that) amending the existing commit makes sense. But I don't think we need to encode a rule into this document.
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Adds a section to the contributing guide outlining the process for maintainers to take over stale pull requests. This ensures valuable contributions are not lost when an author becomes unresponsive, while preserving original author credit and providing transparency on modifications, as discussed at the 2026 containerd Maintainer Summit.
Assisted-by: Antigravity