Problems getting developer access to the xorg cvs

[Keith Whitwell]

Deron Johnson wrote:
> A member of the Looking Glass team (Amir Bukhari) has been trying
> to get developer access to the xorg cvs for about a month now.
> It has been an unnecessarily painful process for him. Figuring out
> exactly how to go about doing this has been difficult because the
> xorg documentation concerning this was out of date in that it named
> Kaleb Keithly who no longer acts in the role of providing access.
> My understanding is that the documentation is being updated to
> instruct people to send mail to the sitewranglers alias. Unfortunately,
> sitewranglers is a moderated mailing list so anyone trying to mail
> to it gets a bounce which basically says that the moderator is waiting
> to review your mail. This doesn't seem like a very good interface for
> accepting new developers. It would be better if there were an alias
> which responded to the effect that "your request for developer access
> has been received and a reply will be sent shortly." People shouldn't
> be required to send to an alias that they ordinarily aren't allowed to
> send to in order to achieve something so basic.
> 
> Overall I think xorg needs to improve the process of accepting new
> developers. If its hard for new people to join then it becomes somewhat
> of an elitist club. I never would have thought that it would take more
> than a month to get someone developer access.

I'm not necessarily in favour of people being granted CVS access sight unseen. 
  I don't know what your developer's situation is, but I don't think there 
should be an expectation that people who haven't participated in development 
previously, I'm talking about submitting patches, bug reports, etc., should 
expect CVS access just by asking for it.  Nor, obviously, do I think that the 
XFree86 idea of (I don't know how much) more than 5 years of waiting for this 
is desireable either.

But I do feel that CVS access should be a priviledge granted sometime after a 
person has individually shown themselves to be a worthwhile & useful 
developer.  It's obviously a lot less contentious to weed people out *before* 
granting CVS access to being in a position later on where you have to yank it, 
which is always going to lead to hard feelings.

So, in respect to your developer, I don't see any posts to this list from him 
(though I don't have a full archive, so I could be wrong) - shouldn't some 
basic participation in the public lists be a prerequisite to CVS access?

Also let me note that I'm not in a position to influence the descision one way 
or another, just expressing my opinions on the matter.

Keith