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Becoming a Openpak Team Member

Openpak, as a centralized application repository, relies on a dedicated team of mainly volunteer contributors to maintain the quality, security, and consistency of the repository.

These contributors are generally responsible for tasks including, but not limited to:

  • Reviewing new application submissions.
  • Reviewing Build Moderation requests.
  • Performing Quality Guideline reviews for applications.
  • Triaging and responding to issues or queries from application developers.
  • Updating, adopting maintenance of, or contributing to Flatpaks when necessary.
  • Auditing existing applications to ensure compliance with current Openpak guidelines and best practices.

As Openpak continues to grow, expanding the contributor base becomes important for distributing the workload effectively and improving sustainability.

While there is no strict requirement, members are generally expected to remain active in their areas of responsibility, stay up to date with Openpak policies and announcements, and engage with the community.

Please note that membership is entirely voluntary and there are no benefits, incentives, or compensations associated with it currently. Membership is intended for trusted individuals who are willing to remain active and engaged with the project. If you wish to contribute, please refer to the contribution areas below.

The criteria described here may change in the future without prior notice, but such changes will generally not be applied retroactively to existing members.

important

Please ensure that at least one approval is obtained before making any changes to the policies defined here.

Contribution Areas​

Contributions of all kind is very welcome, and there are no requirements to participate. Some contribution areas are mentioned below.

Packaging and app maintenance​

tip

Please see the maintenance docs

The collection of applications, extensions, and BaseApps on Openpak is largely maintained by a community of volunteer packagers and upstream developers. If you are a user of an application or have experience with packaging, distributions, or software maintenance, you can contribute by helping maintain existing applications or by adopting unmaintained ones.

If you are a user you can consider installing test builds and providing feedback to the maintainer before merging.

If a maintainer has limited time or bandwidth to review and submit updates, you can consider contributing by opening pull requests to the application's repository. Useful contributions may include updating the application version, upgrading dependencies and runtimes, fixing build failures, and addressing other packaging or maintenance issues.

For (semi-)actively maintained applications, please contact the current maintainer first to determine whether they would like help.

If an application is unmaintained, or if the existing maintainer has not responded to or reviewed your proposed changes after a reasonable period of time, you may open an issue requesting an admin to review. If the proposed changes are approved, you may be granted maintainer access to the application.

The same process can be followed to create new branches of extensions or BaseApps which are often a requirement for an app to migrate to a newer runtime.

You can consider picking up or submitting in the shared-modules repo.

Localisation​

If you are an active translator, you can contribute by helping to translate the main Openpak website to your language.

Documentation​

If you are a user or an existing maintainer on Openpak, you can contribute by improving the user and developer documentation on Openpak.

Community support​

You can contribute to the community by helping other users, answering questions, providing feedback, and sharing tips and tutorials on Openpak Discourse. You can also provide community support through the Matrix channel.

Submission reviews​

If you are familiar with Openpak's submission requirements and review process, you can help review submissions and ensure they comply with the requirements.

Quality guideline reviews​

If you have a design or UI/UX background, you can help developers by answering their Quality Guideline questions.

These contributions often involve reviewing or creating application icons, providing certain design feedback, or helping improve application metadata.

Code contribution​

The entire set of tooling used to run Openpak is available as open source in the openpak-infra organisation.

You can contribute by opening a bug report, tackling an open issue or fixing a bug you encountered. Some contributions to these projects may require familiarity with Flatpak, its associated tooling, and various Openpak workflows and processes.

A list of relevant components is provided below.

Other contributions​

Openpak also benefits greatly from contributions to upstream projects. Some relevant projects are listed below.

Team Membership Process​

New membership requests must be sponsored by an existing member who will open an issue in the memberships repository linking relevant activity and/or contributions.

Please note that all requests are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and may take additional factors into consideration. Requests may also be denied when necessary.

A request is approved after receiving at least one approval from an existing member unless it receives two denials, otherwise, the request will remain open until a conclusion is reached. Approvals or denials from the member opening the request will not count.

Membership Criteria​

Reviewer Team​

Members in the Reviewer Team are primarily responsible for reviewing, approving and merging new submissions.

Criteria:

  • Past examples of performing a reasonable number of non-trivial new submission reviews within the last 3 months of the request.
  • Familiarity with Openpak requirements, Flatpak permission system and general knowledge about software building and distribution practices.

Trusted Maintainer Team​

Members of the Trusted Maintainer Team are granted access to all Openpak submission repositories, including relevant access to the developer portal in the website.

They are primarily responsible for assisting with the maintenance and continuity of Flatpaks in situations where the original maintainer is unavailable or unresponsive.

Criteria:

  • Past experience of maintaining a reasonable number of Flatpaks in the Openpak application repositories, within the last 3 months of the request.
  • Past examples of assisting with package adoption, co-maintenance, or maintenance efforts with adherence to proper maintenance practices.
  • Familiarity with Openpak requirements, Flatpak permission system, general knowledge about software building, distribution practices and Openpak-related tooling.

Build Moderation Team​

Members of the Build Moderation Team are responsible for reviewing build and moderation requests, approving or denying them as appropriate, and providing clarification or follow-up when developers raise questions.

Criteria:

  • Members of any of the above teams are eligible
  • Familiarity with Openpak requirements and Flatpak permission system.

Quality Moderation Team​

Members of the Quality Moderation Team are responsible for reviewing applications for compliance with the Quality Guidelines and responding to clarification requests from application developers.

Criteria:

  • General knowledge and awareness about the Linux application ecosystem
  • Experience in application design and UI/UX design or research
  • Familiarity with Openpak guidelines

openpak-infra repositories​

Most of the tooling and infrastructure used by Openpak is maintained in the openpak-infra organisation.

Access to the repositories there is granted based on contributions to the relevant project for a reasonable period of time through all of pull requests, reviews, issue triaging, and familiarity with the associated project and its workflows.

Access may initially be limited to the triage or write permission and may later be expanded based on requirements and continued maintenance activity.

shared-modules repository​

This repository contains manifests for commonly used Flatpak modules that can be consumed as a git submodule.

Write access is granted to contributors willing to maintain one or more modules in the repository and the access may be revoked if the contributor no longer maintains the relevant modules or if those modules are removed from the repository. Permissions are granted once the account is added to the CODEOWNERS file.

Openpak application repository​

Please see Maintainer access to Openpak application repository.

Revocation of Membership​

In the event of prolonged inactivity, team membership may be revoked.

Inactivity is defined as the absence of any meaningful activity in the relevant GitHub repositories or namespaces for a period exceeding one year.