On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 10:47 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
While full of optimism and excitement in mid-September, while constantly active in #mediawiki for over a month, the attitude of the developers (who you do not name, where's the transparency in this process?) and yourself have just leeched out any energy I have towards the MediaWiki community.
The process has evolved quite a bit over time. At some point, it was on MediaWiki.org. Tim moved it to an OTRS queue and now there's some sort of Star Chamber involved in deciding who gets commit access. The current process and procedure is antithetical to Wikimedia's and MediaWiki's operating principles of openness, transparency, and a low barrier to entry. I think a few people realize this/have realized this, but the prevailing view among them is largely "fuck it, we'll switch to git soon and this won't be such an issue." You should not believe that everyone is supportive or accepting of the recent trends against transparency, though. That isn't the case.
At no point was any attempt made to contact me in IRC (despite my high level of participation there) to speed up this process in any manner, to ask for clarification or voice concerns. Instead it's been 7 weeks of silence with sudden burst of "produce this -- sorry no answer yet, with heavy undertones of doesn't look good".
Speed has never been a strong point of Wikimedia or MediaWiki development.
There appear to be problems with every system we've used so far for granting commit access: 1) Initially, commit access was given by senior developers (=Brion or Tim) after a private email to them. This system was highly dependent on their workload because they had to consider everything themselves. 2) When a public page for commit access requests was created, it worked great for community participation in discussion and it had actually taken some load off senior developers' shoulders - eg volunteers advised the candidates on stuff like "this is not a valid SVN username" and "please activate email on your mw.o account so that you will receive CR notifications". Transparency was great, too. The only problem with this system was that it was also great in letting people forget about pending requests for a long time. 3) OTRS allows to see conveniently what needs to be done and how long it's been waiting for reply, however it is not transparent, prone to mistakes by a single human like in Huib's case, and puts all the workload on several staffers, stealing a couple of man-hours per week from the Foundation's limited resources.
So my proposal is to handle commit access requests in the way most other FLOSS projects do it: on the dev mailing list. Public discussions will give far more eyes for analysis of every application and allow decision-makers to make final decisions by glancing through public discussions instead of analysing everything themselves. And transparency will make all accusations of cabalism or carelessness impossible. What do you think about this idea, people?