Now, the usual way of contributing would be submitting a patch into bugzilla and someone of the committers would look at the patch and (perhaps) apply it, right? So, if instead of entering this into bugzilla, the patch is send directly to a committer looking at the patch and then (perhaps) applying it, where is the difference?
I would say that there are at least three differences:
1. it's more "politically correct" to the community: in practice there is little or no difference, but at a very least there is a delta of time where it's possible to discuss the patch;
2. <lawyer-hat-on>if a user uploads a patch to Bugzilla, from a legal standpoint it's more clear that it's been *him* willing to donate the code to the ASF. As of now it's just you acting both as a proxy and as a witness for him</lawyer-hat-on>;
3. the contributing user gets more recognition and, since recognition is our only way to pay him back, I think it's better for both us and them to go through Bugzilla.
No one of the above is a compelling reason: there are cases when it just makes sense to commit right away. I'd just think of it as a "best practice".
This is no different from what I did with Guido. I think it's pretty clear to everyone here that I and Guido have many reason to work offlist being both working for Orixo companies, but after the initial joint WebDAV contribution, when he sent me a first patch I asked him to go through Bugzilla so that the community was at least aware of what he was doing.
This, however, doesn't change the fact that me too:
I'm really happy that people are contributing to Cocoon, especially to the Cocoon portal.
All contributions are most welcome. :-)
Ciao,
-- Gianugo Rabellino Pro-netics s.r.l. - http://www.pro-netics.com Orixo, the XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com (Now blogging at: http://blogs.cocoondev.org/gianugo/)
