Symfony project is developed by a large group of code contributors and documentation contributors. Some of these contributors have gained a lot of respect from the community due to their activity and commitment to the project.

Fabien Potencier, the leader of the Symfony project, announced during his keynote at the recent Symfony Live Paris 2014 conference the creation of the Symfony Core Team. This team not only intends to recognize and reward the great contribution made by these developers, but it will also be the foundation for the brand-new Symfony development workflow:

Symfony development workflow

The first important change is that a selected group of Symfony developers have been granted access to commit directly to some Symfony repositories. This group, called mergers, is initially composed of:

In addition, to accelerate the development of new features, another selected group of developers have been granted the privilege of accepting/rejecting the pull requests submitted by the community. This group, called deciders, is initially composed of:

From now on, a pull request will need at least two +1 votes from deciders and mergers before merging it into the Symfony repositories. Also, pull requests with at least one -1 vote from these core members won't be merged. The pull request #3777 contains the document explaining all the details about the merging and voting policies.

Does this mean that community opinions won't be taken into account and that most pull requests will be rejected without reconsideration? Absolutely not! First, all -1 votes must always be justified by technical and objective reasons. Moreover, core members can change their votes during the course of a pull request discussion after listening to the community arguments. Lastly, most rejected pull requests can be reconsidered again after making the requested changes.

We strongly believe that the new Symfony Core Team and the new workflow will allow us to accelerate Symfony development while maintaining the quality and the vision of the project. However, we'd love to hear you opinions and comments about these changes.

Published in #Symfony