Oh my, I'm in this os scene for so many years now and sure: I know the problems and the potential dangers. But of course there is also the danger of "death by discussion"! And please, just take some minutes and think about all the commits made to Cocoon - you'll find many examples where things haven't been discussed before and "in the end it was good" - noone really complained.
As I said, a mixture is the way to go. Every committer should ask himself if the changes he wants to make require a discussion or not. This really depends. For example applying a patch submitted to bugzilla could change behaviour, so applying this patch should be discussed beforehand. Other patches might be applyable without discussion. It's the responsibility of the committer to check this. And sometimes mistakes happen here. Every commit can be rolled back - so there is no problem as long as the committer accepts that it was a mistake.
This thread touches several areas where we could work better as a community. Personally, I don't like the title "core developer" - this implies that we have different types of committers, some being more important than others. *This* is imho *totally wrong* and leads to wrong assumptions. Everyone's voice here has the same weight, so every one is welcome:
- to suggest improvements
- to apply patches
- to fix bugs
- to enhance the docs
- to add new features
- to ask questions
- to discuss
- to vote
- to drink beer at the GT
- etc.
- and finally: to participate in the community
But by using titles like "core developer" we create very quickly the image that only the core developers are allowed to work with the core. And that's just rubbish.
So, again: everyone is invited to join the party. Open Source is either driven by itch scratching (well, not always, but that's not important here), so if it itches, do something about it, that's all I can say.
Carsten
-- Carsten Ziegeler - Open Source Group, S&N AG http://www.s-und-n.de http://www.osoco.org/weblogs/rael/
