Yaron Koren wrote: (...)
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":
Maybe the request wasn't clear pointing to the existing Ad Manager extension, already copied to our svn. Or perhaps Sumana read it too quickly and missed it. Looks it shouldn't have been rejected.
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.
I agree. GSoC students get accounts much easier than other people, and are generally worse developers at the beginning. OTOH, there are developers "assigned" to mentor them, so that may strike it out.
Equally, given your vouch for Ike, I think that the application should accepted.
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?
Yes. We want developer access to be easy. We want mediawiki extensions to live in our svn as far as we can. There is even a project to use virtual machines as a development infrastructure. And extension access is not a big deal anyway.
And out of curiosity - is there a new policy in place?
Not that I know of. Although Sumana is probably applying some consistent rules. Review of developer requests was more random before.