Governance

Ilavrita is an open-source project developed under Vestcodes product governance. This document describes who decides what, and how that changes.

Roles

Contributor — anyone who opens an issue, reviews a change or sends a pull request. No process to join.

Maintainer — reviews and merges changes in an area, and is accountable for its quality. Listed in MAINTAINERS.md.

Project lead — arbitrates when maintainers do not reach agreement, and owns releases, licensing and the public product boundary. Currently @0xvestcodes.

Becoming a maintainer

Sustained, high-quality contribution in an area, plus the judgement to say no to changes that do not belong. Existing maintainers nominate; the project lead confirms. A maintainer who steps back or becomes inactive moves to emeritus; nothing about that is a judgement of their work.

Making decisions

Most decisions are made in the open on issues and pull requests, and most are uncontroversial. Where maintainers disagree, the aim is consensus; failing that, the project lead decides and records why.

Decisions that change the architecture are written down as an architecture decision record so the reasoning survives the people who made it.

Scope control

Ilavrita has an explicit v0.1 boundary and an explicit list of non-goals, both set by the product requirements. A change that widens the boundary needs product approval before it needs code review — this is the main reason a well-written pull request gets declined.

What is not decided here

Licensing terms, the contributor agreement, trademark policy and any compliance claim are owned by Vestcodes and require legal review. Maintainers cannot grant exceptions to them.

Changing this document

By pull request, approved by the project lead.