[Python-Dev] Thoughts fresh after EuroPython

[Philippe Fremy]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> While the EuroPython sprints are still going on, I am back home, and
> after a somewhat restful night of sleep, I have some thoughts I'd like
> to share before I get distracted. Note, I am jumping wildly between
> topics.
>
> - Commit privileges: Maybe we've been too careful with only giving
> commit privileges to to experienced and trusted new developers. I
> spoke to Ezio Melotti and from his experience with getting commit
> privileges, it seems to be a case of "the lion is much more afraid of
> you than you are afraid of the lion". I.e. having got privileges he
> was very concerned about doing something wrong, worried about the
> complexity of SVN, and so on. Since we've got lots of people watching
> the commit stream, I think that there really shouldn't need to be a
> worry at all about a new committer doing something malicious, and
> there shouldn't be much worry about honest beginners' mistakes either
> -- the main worry remains that new committers don't use their
> 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.
>   
I would like to highlight that other open source projects have used more
liberal commit right policies, without the project breaking into pieces,
to the contrary.

For example, in KDE, you usually get commit rights on your second patch
submisssion. The contributors have reported that it really helped to
convert from "occasional contributors" to "active contributors" and were
encouraged by the trust given by the project community. They felt a new
sense of responsibility toward the project with the ability to
contribute directly. There was never any malicious commits done to KDE
using this liberal policy. The newcomers tend to be extremely careful.

If you keep the newcomers under the umbrella of a mentor for a few
months and with the additional security of post-commit reviews, I am
sure that you are not taking any real risks on the codebase.

cheers,

Philippe