I think the point about 'ownership' of extension repos is an interesting
one: certainly Wikimedia-hosted projects do differ from other popular
FOSS projects in that there's far more collaboration on e.g. extensions
than is perhaps common elsewhere. For example, if you have a WordPress
or Dokuwiki repo it's basically yours to do with what you will, in that
no one is going to come and merge code that you've not okayed (obviously
there's a requirement for checking for random weird non-project or spam
stuff, but we're just talking about bonafide contributions).
There are some things that no one minds being committed by other
developers — most projects have some system of l10n messages being
incorporated easily, for example. And MediaWiki extensions now have the
great libraryupgrader which is in a similar vein (although I admit the
first time it ran on an extension I maintain I tried to revert it!).
But what I think we lack is particularly clear guidance for new
maintainers, who may come with experience of other projects where
they've had more autonomy, and for whom some random person committing
files will come as a shock. It'd be nice to just say "hey, now you're a
maintainer, you can expect others to help out and sometimes do things to
this code without waiting for your consent". I don't really think having
+2 rights is the same as being a "maintainer", and people with the
former should defer to the latter in most situations.
(Of course, advertising community norms is sort of what the Code of
Conduct file is there for! But I'm not really talking just about that,
but about the general idea that Yaron raised about when one can expect
others to change one's codebase. Maybe the CONTRIBUTING.md file should
exist too.)
— Sam.
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