On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Yaron Koren <ya...@wikiworks.com> wrote:
> I think developer accounts on the Wikimedia SVN repository should be > easier to get. I was under the impression that getting one *was* easy...but admittedly things have changed quite a bit since 2008. > When he requested access, this was the relevant part of the response > from Sumana: > > "Right now, we are not approving your request for commit access. I'm > sorry. We'd like for you to get more practice writing code for > MediaWiki, submit patches for review via Bugzilla attachments, and ask > us for comments... Please come back and request access again in a few > months." > > I don't know whether this is WMF policy now, or a personal decision > from Sumana, or a decision made by someone else, but in any case I > don't understand it. > I don't think it was Sumana's personal decision, as I believe that a group of people decide what to do with pending commit access requests. In any case, I would have to agree with your conclusion, as I did some review and fixing on the mentioned AdManager extension. > It seems to me that there are two valid reasons > for not simply allowing everyone to get a developer account: the > first, and major, reason is to prevent malicious users from > vandalizing or deleting code. The second is to prevent > well-intentioned but incompetent developers from checking in buggy > and/or badly-written code that requires lots of fixes and review time > by the reviewers. In both cases, the person's presence in SVN would > cause more harm than good. I'm sure that we've had some incompetent developers in the past, but becoming a competent dev takes some time and work. :-) > Clearly a higher bar is being > applied here than what's spelled out in the mediawiki.org > documentation - which only says that "we don't have time to train > programmers from scratch": > > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access#Prerequisites Yeah, it certainly seems like that. If and when we want to encourage people to share their code and receive various fixes, rejecting valid commit access requests isn't the way to do that. > It seems to me that if someone writes an extension that basically > matches the MediaWiki guidelines, works, and does something useful, > they should pretty much be granted automatic access to an account, > because they will have proved that their presence will be a net > positive overall. Any thoughts on this? +1 > And out of curiosity - is there a new policy in place? I wouldn't know, as the process has changed over the years, but I have to say that I liked it when commit access requests were on the MediaWiki.org wiki ([[mw:Commit access requests]]) -- IMO it was a better and more transparent way to manage commit access requests than an OTRS queue or whatever is used nowadays; then again, I'm just giving suggestions here, I'm not here to make any decisions as I'm not employed by the Foundation. Thanks and regards, -- Jack Phoenix MediaWiki developer _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
