On 05/11/11 17:47, MZMcBride wrote:
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 main reason I moved it to OTRS was so that messages from requesters would send me an email notification, allowing me to shorten the response time. While it was on the wiki, I only managed to check it about once a month. With OTRS, I could do batches of new requests once a week, and respond to followups immediately.
The current system involves a weekly phone meeting involving Sumana and a couple of developers, consisting mostly of silence as people read tickets and code. The outcomes for each ticket are basically:
1. Sumana finds some problem with how the request was written. She'll make a note and eventually send a followup asking for more information. No code review is done.
2. Code review is done and looks fine. Sumana makes a note and approves the request within a day or so.
3. Code review is done and there is some problem. Usually the developer will make a private note, and then Sumana will handle writing the response.
4. Oops, out of time. Outcome deferred for another week.
The old system wasn't perfect. I didn't really like writing rejections, so for some people, I left the ticket open for months when I didn't want to approve them. And a couple of times, I put the whole thing out of my mind for a month or so and didn't approve anyone.
The theory behind this new system was that Sumana would be able to communicate with volunteers with more tact and grace than a developer would be able to manage, and would be able to follow up rapidly, thus leading to happier new committers who are more willing to contribute.
For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be working as planned. I think some changes are required.
The license issue sounds like a red herring. The basic requirement is that your code be compatible with the code it adapts/modifies and that it be FOSS. If people are getting caught up in petty copyright bullshit paranoia, they need to be taken out 'round back.
He wanted to have a contributor agreement which required anyone who changed the file in Subversion to assign copyright to him. The content was all under a BSD-style license and anyone could modify it, so the contract would have to have the form "if you agree to assign copyright, I will agree to allow you to commit to this file".
This kind of agreement is quite common in certain circles, but for it to work, the person who you're making the contract with has to be able to restrict write access to the source code repository. Since Olivier wasn't going to be able to restrict commit access himself, and we weren't going to do it for him, the contributor agreement didn't make sense.
Olivier gave a detailed response. The complexity of the issue seems to have resulted in Olivier's ticket being left in the "too hard" basket for about a month.
The smiles and nice words seem to be a lot of passive-aggressiveness. I've seen some similarly disturbing behavior lately on Bugzilla, where patches are greeted with "great, thanks for submitting this patch; we haven't reviewed it, but maybe at some point we might; why don't you contribute more in the meantime?"
It's not passive-aggressive, it's just misjudged.
-- Tim Starling