hey, It strikes me that the process to become an ASF committer is turning out to be a little too onerous for some of our purposes.
Nowadays we have these rule sandboxes ( http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/RuleSandboxes ), and we want to allow all sorts of people -- including occasional contributors who might add a rule once every 3 months, for example -- to add rules to them for testing. However, we still have this process where people who are not committers, have to go through a committer to get their rules in there, or become a full committer. Ideally, it should be possible that they can just write the rules to the repository themselves so it can be picked up for testing, without our intervention -- that's what the sandbox system was intended to help with! We discussed this when setting up the sandboxes, and decided to go with committer access only -- because we couldn't see a way to get a less onerous, more open model that fits with the ASF policies. But I don't think this is working. So: - (a) Is there a way to add a new type of committer for sandboxes only, with a lower "barrier to entry"? I notice that one of the options for the Summer of Code students is to give them freer reign on a side branch, which strikes me as a similar setup. - (b) more importantly: is this worth doing? Are we likely to get more interest in rule development if we do this? Any thoughts? --j.
