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by mudkipdev 731 days ago
Just curious, what kind of global changes do you usually make? And what is the process of becoming an approver?
2 comments

I was also global approver.

Examples of global changes include:

- changes to Buildifier that require updating existing files

- rename/refactor a function used everywhere in the repository

- fix the existing code before turning a lint warning into an error

- fix code that will break with a compiler update

Anyone in the company can propose this kind of change. The proposal will be reviewed by a committee (to ensure the change is worthwhile, that are mechanisms to prevent regressions, etc.) and by a domain expert (the team that owns the area).

Global approvers are people who often deal with this kind of changes. They usually come from the language teams (e.g. I knew the specificities that come with global changes touching BUILD/Starlark files).

> what is the process of becoming an approver?

New approvers are nominated by an existing member and then LGTM'ed by other three. Usually they have gained a lot of large scale change experiences on the other side, and we recognize that we could use more help on the committee side. Especially we want a good coverage on various languages, tech stacks, and time zones.