I am sure that the upper-tier of ASF would shiver at the thought that hordes of people can gain direct access to the repositories. They/we will dust of the same arguments of why Wiki won't work. But it does. Why? Because *most* people *want* it to work.
Baloney. Code review is *essential*. For httpd, we require *three* people to sign off on any change before it gets merged into the stable branch. We take our responsibility for providing stable software *extremely* seriously. We're not about to deploy untested (and unreviewed) fixes to the general population. It would not bode well on our personal reputations or of our software's. Therefore, we're also extremely cautious about adding new committers.
Furthermore, for example, lots of people suggest patches to httpd. They think their patch is right. But, more often then not, their patches are incorrect because they aren't as familiar with the code as the committers are. If you turned the httpd repository into a wiki-style free-for-all, it would be an extreme uphill battle to keep the code clean because it would turn into anarchy. The current committers won't be able to keep up and the code would degenerate as everyone throws in what they think is right without having any mandatory review process in place.
An ex post facto review process (CTR) isn't always acceptable for production-grade software because the reality is that real people can't keep up with a high volume! CTR works well only when you have a stable core of people whom you trust - as httpd does for its unstable branch, but even then we still use RTC for our stable branches because we want to be as-certain-as-we-humans-can-be that our fixes are right before we merge them into stable.
I believe the quality of the code base is in direct proportion to the effort required to get commit bits and what it takes to get a change in. There are projects here in ASF-land that don't care at all about actual users and are willing to leave them in the lurch due to petty political battles. That's not the spirit of open source I care about or want the ASF to support. -- justin
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