[development] Hit and run contrib

[Daniel F. Kudwien]

> What kinks? I think http://drupal.org/node/251466 is pretty
straightforward.
> If you have suggestions for improvement, please comment.

No kinks.  The current process works.  However:

We should really start to think about i) project maintainership, ii)
educating current maintainers, iii) educating new maintainers, and iv)
encouraging co-maintainership and joining forces.

As with any other thing that grows in the extent like Drupal's user-base,
there have to be standards.

There are several projects that badly need more co-maintainers.  This even
includes popular projects, and I don't want to limit this to some examples,
because most are affected.  If most of the existing projects were
maintained, developed, and supported better, we would not have that much
new/duplicate/half-baked projects like now.

But who wants to grant CVS access to unfamiliar folks?  Will a new
co-maintainer rewrite your whole module (including API changes) and even
commit that thingy to the current branch?  Will he/she write clean, secure
and documented code, and proper changelog entries and commit messages?

We have good Coding Standards.  But do we have standards for common
processes?  (Please don't point me to the handbook pages, I know most of
them.)  In the handbooks, we're talking about best practices.  So a newcomer
/can/ adopt these processes.  But if he/she does not, will *you* grant CVS
access?  I don't think so.

OTOH, if there was a prepared candidate - would you really grant CVS access?
Would you grant access to me?

Instead of complaining, let's talk about setting up standards and guidelines
to help existing projects and maintainers to evolve.


What's missing in contrib is some kind of a /dynamic/ drive.  For example,
we encourage maintainers to commit patches and credit the contributor(s)
using a message of the following syntax:

"#12345 by sun: Fixed coding-style."

We are parsing the "#12345" bit, but why don't we also parse the "by sun"
bit to assign 'contributor credits' to users for the corresponding project?
If my username is covered in a certain amount of commits, am I eligible to
automatically get CVS access?  Maybe?


cheerio,
Daniel