Hi,
I think developer accounts on the Wikimedia SVN repository should be
easier to get. I say this because a consultant of ours at WikiWorks,
Ike Hecht, asked for a developer account last week and was rejected.
He created his first major MediaWiki extension, Ad Manager, recently,
which I added to the repository a few weeks ago - you can see it here:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/AdManager/
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. 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.
Neither of those cases apply here - the Ad Manager code was
well-written, and it works. If you're curious, you can see for
yourself the kinds of fixes and changes that were made to the code
after it was checked in - all minor stuff, the only major thing being
that the extension originally included support for MediaWiki 1.15,
which people thought was unnecessary. 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
Note, by the way, that if there's a more stringent policy in place
now, it's not being applied consistently, because the students in this
year's Google Summer of Code got developer access after much less
proof of programming ability.
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?
And out of curiosity - is there a new policy in place?
-Yaron
--
WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting ·
http://wikiworks.com