John Wilkins wrote:
The issue then becomes: how do patch developers get the attention of committers or of the committer's web of trust? The only current method is to get it marked RTBC. But then those developers get frustrated as their issues languish in an RTBC queue that is the /self-described/ last step.
There's no single magic way to become trusted, except to have your contributions noticed. Being active and having your name appear over and over again with good contributions is the way to do it. It's not an overnight process, but that's how most of the people in my generation did it. For whatever reason, our contributions were noticed. And it's not just code contributions. Steven Peck and Michelle Cox are both well known contributors that don't contribute code at all. (In this case they largely contribute documentation and forum support). Your patch reviews will get noticed if they are thorough and detailed. If your review is terse, nobody can tell if it's because you liked things or because you didn't. If you go the extra mile and call out things you particularly like and things you don't, that can help get noticed. And a good reviewer is obligated to *thoroughly* understand Drupal's coding style. This is probably the part that takes the longest, but by reading lots of code and doing lots of reviews, that comes naturally. I realize that newer people really want to contribute right away. And that's great. It's frustrating that it's hard to contribute when newer, and that's a problem, but there are a lot of parts about the system that are fixed simply with experience. And that experience comes, basically, by being a goat: i.e, facing the wall and hitting it, over and over again, until you understand the wall. (Yes, that analogy is terrible).