[development] Trust (was: Hit and run contrib)

[Earl Miles]

Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> On Friday, 30. May 2008, Daniel F. Kudwien wrote:

> On the other hand, just recently I noticed a missing break; statement 
> somewhere in Views. Checked out with CVS. But it didn't directly concern me 
> or pose any problems to what I was doing, and opening up a new issue would 
> have taken more time and effort than I was willing to put in. Like, "someone 
> will probably fix it anyways". With commit access, I would have committed the 
> fix right away, and in the unlikely case that it's actually wrong (and a
> "// fall through" comment would be required instead) then Earl would have 
> noticed and fixed it the right way. It's probably still unfixed, I guess.
> 
> Let incompetent CVS users release their modules on their own server (they're 
> probably no good for drupal.org either) and educate them to get into version 
> control and patches before they're granted a CVS account. In turn, give trust 
> to the people who actually have proven to be worthy of a CVS account.

Views is a large and complex system. It turns out that even very small 
changes can have a very large impact that is not necessarily clear to 
people who don't have a good feel for how the entire system is put together.

Given the incidence of patches that are Just Wrong that I get (at least 
10%, mostly they're Just Wrong because they fix the symptom, not the 
problem) from people who are perfectly confident that their fix is the 
right one, I shudder to think about what could happen if just anyone 
could commit to Views at this point.

Now, this never actually happened when just anyone COULD commit to 
Views, luckily, but there's always been a stigma against committing to 
people's projects without permission. Now it's just coded.

But you know what HAS happened? A lot?

People screwing up and being in the wrong directory when they commit and 
adding their stuff to the root directory rather than their module. Or 
not realizing they'd left in some change when they were hacking and 
committed that.

No, if you think you're very smart and you've spotted a bug in Views and 
you fix it without ever consulting anyone at all, what have you done to 
make sure it's right? That's why we have a process of peer review.