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