Contributor permissions and Code Owners

One might wonder how permissions work on Lix and how one can help out with certain tasks. This is subject to ongoing governance work. This page is a summary of the current (pretty vibes-based) state of how it works.

Feel free to ask questions about this in the Lix development Matrix room.

Trusted contributors

We give away this permission freely to everyone who has commits in Lix and most people who ask for it with a reason to need it. It confers the rights to:

• Triage issues on Lix project repos
• Edit the wiki
• Access login-only pads on https://pad.lix.systems

Lix approvers

This is the Code-Review+2 permission on Gerrit.

We're working on setting up Code Owners on Gerrit so that changes to specific subsystems require review from a subsystem author or an override. We will likely give away approver access to most active contributors at that point. This permission is given out to responsible contributors to Lix who have been working on Lix for a bit and have shown good understanding of expectations in the project.

There will probably be a more specific process in the future. Currently it's by nomination by people on the Lix team.

Lix team

This category is very much subject to governance work to clarify how it should work. People in this group share administrative infrastructure access with infra maintainers and the Lix community team.

You can ask for help with any infrastructure issues from the Lix team.

Gerrit Code Owners

Gerrit has a concept of "Code Owners". The idea of this is that people responsible for subsystems are required to approve changes to code in their subsystem.

This is hierarchical in terms of specificity, that is to say, the emails of users in the nearest OWNERS file will be suggested first for review requests when clicking "Suggest Owners", before going up to more general reviewers and if all else fails, the global approvers.

If you work on an area in Lix and want to review changes to your area, feel free to add yourself to the OWNERS file for the relevant directory (or the rules for individual files in there).

As of July 2025, we are still working on crystallizing how the code owners plugin should interact with our workflow.