breadcrumbs: Getting Involved > page_name: become-a-committer title: Become a Committer
Technically, a committer is someone who has write access to the Chromium src Git repository. A committer can submit their own patches or patches from others.
This privilege is granted with some expectation of responsibility: committers are people who care about the Chromium projects and want to help them meet their goals. A committer is not just someone who can make changes, but someone who has demonstrated their ability to collaborate with the team, get the most knowledgeable people to review code, contribute high-quality code, and follow through to fix issues (in code or tests).
A committer is a contributor to the Chromium projects' success and a citizen helping the projects succeed. See Committer's responsibility.
What is written below applies to the main Chromium source repos; see the note at the bottom for ChromiumOS, which has different policies. For some other Chromium repos (e.g., the infra repos), we follow the same policies as the main Chromium repos, but have different lists of actual committers. Certain other repos may have different policies altogether. When in doubt, ask one of the OWNERS of the repo in question.
In a nutshell, contribute 10-20 non-trivial patches in the Chromium src Git repository, and get at least three different people to review them (you‘ll need three people to support you). Then ask someone to nominate you. You’re basically demonstrating your
A current committer nominates you by sending email to committers@chromium.org containing the following information. Please do not CC the nominee on the nomination email.
Two other committers need to second your nomination. If no one objects in 5 working days (U.S.), you‘re a committer. If anyone objects or wants more information, the committers discuss and usually come to a consensus (within the 5 working days). If issues can’t be resolved, there's a vote among current committers.
That's it! There is no further action you need to take on your part. The committers will get back to you once they make a decision.
In the worst case, this can drag out for two weeks. Keep writing patches! Even in the rare cases where a nomination fails, the objection is usually something easy to address like “more patches” or “not enough people are familiar with this person's work.”
Once you get approval from the existing committers, we‘ll send you instructions for write access to Git. You’ll also be added to committers@chromium.org. If you work for Google, you are expected to become a sheriff at this point as well (see the internal instructions for how to add yourself to the rotations).
Historically, most committers have worked at least partially on the Chromium core product and thus demonstrated C++ coding ability in their CLs, but this is not required. It is possible to be a committer if you only work on other parts of the code base (e.g., build and test scripts in Python), but you still have to demonstrate that you understand the processes of the project with a list of CLs that you've landed. Committership is primarily a mark of trust, and we expect committers to only submit or approve changes that they are qualified to review. Failure to do so may result in your committership being revoked (also see below for other reasons that you might get your committership revoked).
If you just want to edit bugs, see: Get Bug-Editing Privileges.
Many contributors to chromium have @chromium.org email addresses. These days, we tend to discourage people from getting them, as creating them creates some additional administrative overhead for the project and have some minor security implications, but they are available for folks who want or need them.
At this time there are only a few fairly rare cases where you really need one:
It is also fine to get a @chromium.org address if you simply don‘t want your primary email addresses to be public. Be aware, however, that if you’re being paid to contribute to Chromium your employer may wish you to use a specific email address to reflect that.
You can get a @chromium.org email address by getting an existing contributor to ask for one for you; normally it‘s a good idea to do this as part of being nominated to be a committer. Include in your request what account name you’d like and what secondary email we can use to associate it with (and what company you are affiliated with, if you wish to make that clear; we track this affiliating internally but it isn't publicly visible). People tend to match usernames (for example, someone who usually uses email@example.com would ask for email@chromium.org) to minimize confusion, but you are not required to do so and some people do not.
If you are contributing patches but not (yet) a committer, you may wish to be able to run jobs on the try servers directly rather than asking a committer or reviewer to do so for you. There are two potential scenarios:
You have an @chromium.org email address and wish to use it for your account:
You do not have an @chromium.org email address, or wish to use a different email address. If this is your situation, the process to obtain try job access is the following:
If no one objects within two (U.S.) working days, you will be approved for access. It may take an additional few days for the grant to propagate to all of the systems (e.g., Rietveld) and for you to be notified that you're all set.
Googlers can look up the committers list here.
A community of committers working together to move the Chromium projects forward is essential to creating successful projects that are rewarding to work on. If there are problems or disagreements within the community, they can usually be solved through open discussion and debate.
In the unhappy event that a committer continues to disregard good citizenship (or actively disrupts the project), we may need to revoke that person‘s status. The process is the same as for nominating a new committer: someone suggests the revocation with a good reason, two people second the motion, and a vote may be called if consensus cannot be reached. I hope that’s simple enough, and that we never have to test it in practice.
In addition, as a security measure, if you are inactive on Gerrit for more than a year, we may revoke your committer privileges and remove your email address(es) from any OWNERS files. This is not meant as a punishment, so if you wish to resume contributing after that, contact accounts@ to ask that it be restored, and we will normally do so. This does not mean that we will shut off your @chromium.org address, if you have one; that should continue to work.
If you have questions about your committer status, overall, please contact accounts@chromium.org.
[Props: Much of this was inspired by/copied from the committer policies of WebKit and Mozilla.]
Note that any registered user can do Code-Review +1. Only access to Code-Review +2 in Chromium OS repos is restricted to Googlers and managed by team lead nominations.