Core gates

Core changes must pass through a series of "gates" to ensure their quality is up to standards. Gates are essentially "checklists" that can be used to evaluate a patch's readiness, by both developers and patch reviewers/core committers.

The purpose of gates is two-fold:

• Focus on only the most important items in each category (try to limit to 5 or fewer), so that the process is neither too complex nor too overwhelming for developers to follow.
• Do not create additional burden on the respective individual teams. Rather, have well-documented resources so that developers have what they need to write gate-satisfying code, and reviewers can easily check for gate satisfaction.

The following gates (identified during Dries Buytaert's keynote during DrupalCon Chicago) will be used for assessing Drupal core patch readiness.