Contributor guidelines for Autoware.AI

I have been working on new contributor guidelines for Autoware.AI.

You can see the 3068-word masterpiece draft here.

Also relevant and open to comments are the new support guidelines.

I want these guidelines to go into effect the moment 1.11 is released, so that all of 1.12 development follows them. Please give comments and proposed fixes before then so we can get something we all agree on by that time.

In conjunction with this, I will be cleaning up the repository permissions. We will be shifting to a model where most people develop on their own forks and make PRs against the main Autoware repository. Only about 10 people will have write access to the repository (compared with 90 currently) to merge these PRs, which will hopefully help us fix the quality issues that we are having. It is possible that the number of people with write access will grow over time but for now it will be low.

One of the items on the 1.12 roadmap is to reorganise the repository and split it up. I propose changing the branching model in conjunction with this. The proposed branching model is described in the contributor guide.

Reorganising the repository will be done fairly early in the 1.12 iteration because it needs to be got out of the way. I will be putting out a proposed structure this week for debate.

@gbiggs your 3068-word piece has a wrong link. It should be: https://github.com/CPFL/Autoware/wiki/Contributing-to-Autoware.

Are you or @esteve now merging it https://gitlab.com/AutowareAuto/AutowareAuto/merge_requests/29?

Sorry, I renamed the page the other day to reflect the decision to have it apply to Autoware.Auto as well as Autoware.AI.

@esteve intends to add his material to it, but I’m not sure how far along that is.