Public SourceMage Discussion List

[David Brown <dmlb2000 AT gmail.com>]

From time to time we have new users and other people show up in IRC who
demonstrate that they are able to debug problems and provide good fixes and
patches.  Our normal style is to offer these people developer rights so
that they can fix their own bugs and further contribute to the
distribution.  Quite a lot of us probably got our start in the distro this
way.  Lately we have had a few who have declined this offer because they
didn't feel they were quite ready for an extra level of responsibility.

Yup seen it several times...

For this reason we are going to pilot an "apprentice" system where we give
these people commit access to the devel branch(es) only, with another full
developer accepting responsibility to review their commits and integrate
them to test for them.  Hopefully after doing this a short while and
getting some experience working with our system and policies these
apprentices will feel ready to become full developers.  I will be posting
some info about this to the web site before too long.

I like this, many times I've seen people submit patch files for the linux spell. Perfectly good patch files for new patches that work fine just the way they are... it'd be nice not to have to copy them to the linux spell line for line all the time.

- David Brown