Barry Warsaw wrote:
Of course, I think it /will/ make our lives harder in some ways. As
we've seen, folks like cPanel have their own forks that they modify,
and then their users come looking to us for support, which we can't
give them. Having more public branches out there will increase our
support costs.
I would submit that much of what has caused people in the Mailman community to maintain their own forks is because the software design is insufficiently open, not so much on account of checkin privileges.
Moving Mailman development to distributed trees will force, I suspect, more modularization and extensibility of the code, which will reduce the need for long-lived, independent forks.
Basically, I suspect that while it might increase support issues in the short term, it will ultimately reduce the support-to-participant ratio.
~ethan