[RFC] Let the community play a bigger role in the approval process

[teohhanhui]

As we could tell by the recent comment made through @docker-library-bot, it'd seem that the Docker "Official Repositories" team (@docker-library) is understaffed and is thus unable to respond in a timely manner to many of the PRs here, especially for new images.

WDYT about allowing the community to help?

p/s: In case this request is misunderstood... A big thank you to the team for your great work! 💖 💙 💚 ❤️

[tianon]

Appreciate the kind words -- in fact, we have several community members who help here and there where they can (a lot of times doing precisely what I discuss in the rest of this post), and we try to encourage and enable them as much as possible (and definitely welcome the help).

For "new image" PRs specifically, the majority of the initial review work tends to be reviewing the upstream project to determine whether it's popular, useful, makes sense as an individual image, etc (for example, we've previously had frameworks like django as their own image and determined that there's not really much value in an image just for a framework -- those are normally meant to be consumed directly in an application at a specific version specified by a Gemfile, package.json, etc).

Additionally, there's a fair amount of review of the Dockerfile/context to ensure the image follows the guidelines we've laid out in https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#contributing-to-the-standard-library, which we've tried to make as detailed as possible to help cut down on the amount of work that has to go into this task, but we usually still end up needing to guide contributors (in many cases making an explicit PR to their Dockerization in order to make it completely clear what we expect). Having community members help get folks up to speed on these would be immensely useful.

However, I would also add a word of caution here: don't go too far. What we don't want to happen is to have a contributor work hard to fix a lot of suggestions only to have a maintainer review and determine that some of that work was unnecessary (or worse, in the wrong direction entirely). A lot of our contributors are very generously donating their own personal time to this project, so we want to be as considerate of that as possible.

Hopefully that helps provide some context and helpful information about where we've already got community members contributing today. 👍 ❤️