Jakob Petsovits wrote:
Imho that's a quick-and-dirty workaround, whereas the proper solution would involve letting the contributor commit the patch by herself. That might either be reached by switching to a distributed VCS (where "committer" and "uploader" are decoupled from each other - probably the right solution for core) or by the even more open-sourcey way of granting access to all of contrib by default.
Here's a counter-showcase for you. :) That's how contrib used to be, back when I joined the project (June 2005). On my very first CVS commits to Quiz module (my SoC project), because... a) I didn't know what the hell I was doing and had never used CVS before b) The only docs for CVS back then were geared toward people who already knew CVS and thus were totally useless to me c) Therefore, I was using TortoiseCVS since that was the only thing that made sense and there were absolutely NO docs in the handbook for that ...I ended up somehow changing code in Voting module accidentally during my commits. Look! You can still see it in the list of commits on my user account page. ;) http://drupal.org/user/24967 (I think I did a checkout of the entire contributions repository, added my files, and then committed *everything* from the root modules directory, and in the time between me checking out contrib and getting my stuff ready to commit, Voting module had made a change, and I ended up committing old stuff back. Maybe. I'm still not sure how I ever managed to do this.) Anyway, I got yelled at for it, and directed to send the maintainer of Voting module an e-mail to apologize. After my life finished flashing before my eyes, I did so. Fortunately, he was a nice guy and said it was okay, and managed to undo the damage I'd done, which was great, because I had absolutely no idea how to possibly fix it myself. But how annoying and frustrating must it have been for him, in addition to the stuff he already had on his plate that day, to have to add "fix webchick's stupid CVS mistake" to his TODO list? :( Yes, the docs are better today, and yes, the collective intelligence of the Drupal development community has risen significantly in the past 3 years, so there are more people I could've asked for help nowadays. But consider that I single-handedly managed to cause this poor maintainer at least 20 minutes' worth of un-screwing up what I'd done. And I'm just one person. Figure that some percentage of CVS accounts are newbies like I was (I'd even go as high as 20%, given the questions that regularly pop up on #drupal), and throw the fact that you can branch and tag now and that those have implications on the release system, and that's a *frightening* amount of time that would be spent undoing mistakes, by both module maintainers and the CVS admins. Read http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2006-May/016096.html for more behind the rationale for this change, but IMO this was one of the smartest things we ever did as a community. If anything, this encourages us to allow *more* people to have CVS accounts, because at worst, the only thing they can really screw up is their own modules, not everyone else's. And although I like you a lot and respect your development skills, Jakob, I don't want you or anyone else but Earl Miles and people he's specifically christened as knowledgeable, committing *anything* to Views module, which is used on approximately 40 gazillion sites, even if it is a "simple" break; fix. :) That module is critically important for the community, and Earl has done a fantastic job of maintaining it. Secondly, shame on you for wanting to commit something without a corresponding issue #. Tsk, tsk. ;) Oh. And let's not forget the fact that Update Status module now yells loudly when there are new versions of modules available. So if I'm tracking dev releases (which I might be, while my site's in development, to get the latest stuff) I could cvs up and get the parse error you accidentally left in your break; statement fix (cos, you know, you were in a hurry so you did the commit and then stepped away to go grab a sandwich and got distracted by pickles), then I start screaming at Earl Miles for committing a parse error because I'm just a poor user and don't have the ability to fix the parse error myself. And for old, crusty projects that aren't being maintained which you claim blocks contribution? Ever since Michelle wrote up http://drupal.org/node/248145 I've been noticing a rash of project take-overs (in a good way!), which has resulted both in new contributors AND support for modules that were dying from lack of attention. I follow the webmasters list pretty closely, and have never once heard back from a maintainer screaming, "HEY! What did you give away my project for?!??" The guidelines give the existing maintainer a reasonable timeframe in which to respond, while at the same time not being a horribly long time (two weeks) for a prospective maintainer to wait around, during which time they can submit patches to prove their interest in long-term maintenance, which thus makes our jobs easier to fork over the keys. Basically, are you sure that you're trying to solve something that needs to be solved? -Angie