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List:       mutt-dev
Subject:    Re: The future of mutt... - intermediate aggregation
From:       Holger =?iso-8859-1?Q?Wei=DF?= <lists () jhweiss ! de>
Date:       2013-10-24 18:50:51
Message-ID: 20131024185051.GC1181 () weiss ! in-berlin ! de
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* Derek Martin <invalid@pizzashack.org> [2013-10-24 10:46]:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 02:05:07PM +0200, Holger Weiß wrote:
> > > Of course, but they build only a minority and therefore if the others
> > > don't like their work, why not to revert the commit or rewrite the patch
> > > with prompting the original author that the patch was really bad?
> > 
> > This sounds so awesome!  No need for maintainers.  The community will
> > just magically take over all their work.
> > 
> > Of course, in practice, it doesn't work this way.  Occasional
> > contributors add their favourite feature or fix a bug they stumbled
> > over.  That's it.  They provide patches, they don't do patch review.
> 
> This hasn't been true for Mutt, at least historically.  Some of the
> people who submit patches infrequently have taken the time to review
> other patches (myself included)... though many of those people now do
> actually have commit rights.  I'm one of those people, who still does
> not have commit rights (and frankly, don't want them).

You're pointing out that Mutt has community members who help with patch
review while not having commit rights (yet).  That's true, and it's true
for many other projects as well.  The role of these people is somewhere
in between the prototypical "contributor" and "maintainer" I was talking
about.  Consequently, these people should be likely candidates to become
proper maintainers in the future, as you said.

However, this misses the point I was trying to make.  The Mutt project
always had dedicated maintainers (who've actually been criticised for
being too conservative more than once).  If someone could name just a
single Open Source project who's development has successfully been
driven by accepting arbitrary patches, he'd have a point.

> I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying; I'm just saying it
> isn't a universal truth.  And there are still at least a few in the
> Mutt community who are not maintainers but who still are willing (even
> eager) to take the time to do some of the things you are talking
> about.

If there are people who don't get commit access although they really
should, that's a problem.  But the solution is not to give everyone
commit access.

Holger
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