[development] Trust

[Liam McDermott]

Angela Byron wrote:
> 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), [...] 
> 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

Great example, sounds like something I'd do. Some more empirical 
evidence: I quite often check code out of the wrong branch *of my own 
modules* then get confused when several months of changes have 
disappeared mysteriously. I have, on occasion, tried to commit to 
modules like Views just because of being in the wrong working directory 
(this coupled with the swearing that usually adorns my debug messages 
would make a nice surprise for Earl). I'm making these mistakes using 
GNU/Linux and a terminal: imagine the damage a newbie, wielding Tortoise 
or Eclipse, could do.

I'm blonde, dippy and error prone. So please don't let give me commit 
access to the whole contrib repo, I *will* break it.

However, the suggestion of a distributed system would work nicely. IMO 
that's the road we need to go down *if* we want to be more open and stop 
people, like me, breaking stuff. Don't know how many people view this as 
a priority however. My projects aren't very interesting or popular, so a 
distributed system wouldn't make much difference. I'm the only one 
working on the code! Are most other projects like mine, or would they 
benefit from a distributed RCS?

Better plug the RCS group on g.d.o (just in case anyone on the list 
hasn't seen it): http://groups.drupal.org/revision-control-systems :)

Kind Regards,
Liam McDermott.