A quick observation here, and feel free to flame this mercilessly [1].
As I see it, the purpose of the review of application should be to determine whether the applicant will comply with the d.o requirements regarding licensing, etc -- it should *not* be to judge the merits of the proposed module.
In this case, and in others I have seen, people have been unnecessarily hassled during the CVS application process.
As a community, we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we hassle/turn away developers, especially when we are turning them away for invalid reasons.
If Andrew hadn't posted to the Dev list, his good idea would not have had the opportunity to make it into the community. I wonder how many other good ideas have been lost for the exact same reason.
Well, here's my view. Yes, I'm a new contributor to Drupal. I read the new maintainer documents and followed the advice there, but I didn't expect to get it all right the first time. I was disappointed and a little frustrated that my CVS account was denied, mainly because it wasn't clear to me how else I was supposed to get my code out to the community. But the reason for the denial, although very shortly stated, has merit. We don't want a bunch of trivial modules cluttering up Drupal-- I get that. So I asked on the forums and filed a patch against 6.x core, but I didn't get an answer in either place. But those are noisy places, so I just figured I needed to keep trying. Once I wrote to this list, I got an answer right away and a positive result. So in short I'd say: - The reason for denying my account was valid, but it should have considered, or suggested, what the alternative might be for me to make my code available. - A new developer should expect to need some patience in engaging the community about their contribution. If they're serious about contributing, they'll stick to it. It did occur to me, that a person who already had a CVS account could have contributed the same module at their discretion, while I couldn't because I didn't have an account yet. So it seems that CVS approval was being used as a proxy for module approval. But I also agree that new developers should pass a threshold test for making a sound contribution. Anyway, the community came through in the end. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Andrew.