Ian Bicking writes:

The difference between someone with commit access and some random contributor should be reduced. Anonymous commits should be allowed (or commits with a very low registration threshold -- strict anonymity isn't really important here). The tools should be usable enough that we can say "we don't accept patches, we only accept pointers to branches in our repository".

Call me antiquate, but this sounds like a maintenance nightmare.

Ian's schema may work for projects with only a few, extremely tech-savvy, and disciplined developers. But for big open source with dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of contributors this will soon lead to a plethora of dead branches and unused SCM accounts. Aside from that a lot of potential contributors/bug fixers/next best superstars will not submit their patches because they are not interested in messing with some random SCM software. (I have been bounced around in the PHP development world for quite some time know and there are lots of bug fixers that already have problems submitting unified diffs. Now imagine they would need to install and use git or some other nerd tool ...)

(Via Planet MySQL)

Written on 2005-08-06 22:48:12.