On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:
I think developer accounts on the Wikimedia SVN
repository should be
easier to get.
I was under the impression that getting one *was* easy...but admittedly
things have changed quite a bit since 2008.
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.
I don't think it was Sumana's personal decision, as I believe that a group
of people decide what to do with pending commit access requests. In any
case, I would have to agree with your conclusion, as I did some review and
fixing on the mentioned AdManager extension.
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.
I'm sure that we've had some incompetent developers in the past, but
becoming a competent dev takes some time and work. :-)
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
Yeah, it certainly seems like that. If and when we want to encourage people
to share their code and receive various fixes, rejecting valid commit access
requests isn't the way to do that.
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?
+1
And out of curiosity - is there a new policy in place?
I wouldn't know, as the process has changed over the years, but I have to
say that I liked it when commit access requests were on the
MediaWiki.org
wiki ([[mw:Commit access requests]]) -- IMO it was a better and more
transparent way to manage commit access requests than an OTRS queue or
whatever is used nowadays; then again, I'm just giving suggestions here, I'm
not here to make any decisions as I'm not employed by the Foundation.
Thanks and regards,
--
Jack Phoenix
MediaWiki developer