Governance

How SIL Kit is governed

A small, neutrally-stewarded project with a public charter, public RFCs, and a public decision log. This page is the canonical reference.

Pillars

The four pillars

A balanced group from Vector and Synopsys, plus invited community maintainers. Listed in CODEOWNERS.

Architectural changes start as RFCs in the GitHub repo. Public comment for at least 14 days before a maintainer accepts or declines.

SemVer. Patch and minor releases monthly; majors are pre-announced with deprecation notices in the prior release.

Substantive product decisions require sign-off from at least one maintainer per founding partner. Recorded in the public Decision Log.

The RFC process

1
Draft
An author opens a pull request to the rfcs/ directory. The PR includes context, proposal, alternatives, and migration notes.
2
Public comment
The PR stays open for at least 14 days. Anyone can comment. Maintainers review weekly.
3
Decision
A maintainer either accepts (merge) or declines (close with a reasoned summary). Substantive proposals require sign-off from at least one Vector and one Synopsys maintainer.
4
Decision Log
Every accepted RFC is recorded in the public Decision Log. The log is append-only.

Documents

Every governance document is plain-text and lives in the repository.

Charter

How the project is governed and how decisions are recorded.

CODEOWNERS

Which maintainers own which surfaces of the codebase.

Decision Log

Append-only log of accepted RFCs and the rationale behind each.

Code of Conduct

Contributor Covenant + project-specific clarifications.