On Jul 24, 2010, at 07:08 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>privileges enough. So, my recommendation (which surely is a
>turn-around of my *own* attitude in the past) is to give out more
>commit privileges sooner.

+1, though I'll observe that IME, actual commit privileges become much less of
a special badge once a dvcs-based workflow is put in place. In the absence of
that, I agree that we have enough checks and balances in place to allow more
folks to commit changes

Even with DVCS in place, commit privileges allow the person who cares about a change to move it forward, including the more mechanical aspects. E.g. if there are positive reviews of a person's changes in their fork, they can push those changes in. Or more generally, there's a lot of ways of getting approval, but limited commit privileges means all approval must ultimately be funneled through someone with commit. Also different parts of the codebase should have different levels of review and conservativism; e.g., adding clarifications to the docs requires a different level of review than changing stuff in the core. We could try to build that into the tools, but it's a lot easier to make the tools permissive and build these distinctions into social structures.