[Python-Dev] I would like an svn account

[Brett Cannon]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 16:55, Victor Stinner
<victor.stinner at haypocalc.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I already asked in September to get an svn account to be able to commit
> directly patches to trunk (or other branches like py3k). My query was
> rejected because I didn't know Python core enough (and maybe other reasons
> that I don't know).
>

I am going to stick my neck out on this one and say why I have not
spoken up for giving you commit privs, Victor, and my general thoughts
on handing them out since I don't think this has been stated by anyone
before.

When it comes to commit privs in general, I am of the school that they
should be handed out carefully. I for one do not want to have to
babysit other committers to make sure that they did something
correctly. That's a waste of my time since that defeats the purpose of
having more committers. This is why I think Benjamin got is privs too
soon. Luckily Georg took it upon himself, I assume because he gave
Benjamin the privileges, to double-check all of Benjamin's checkins
and fix them until Benjamin absorbed enough of the development process
to no longer need to be watched over. But I was honestly rather close
to suggesting Benjamin lose is privileges early on until he had more
time to figure out how things worked. Luckily it didn't come to that
and Benjamin has turned out to be a good developer.

I also want people who have no agenda. It's okay to have an area you
care about, but that doesn't mean you should necessarily say "I will
only work on math, ever, even if something is staring me right in the
face!", etc.

There is also dedication. I don't like giving commit privileges to
people who I don't think will definitely stick around. It's fine if
they come and go, but if I am not sure if they will typically come
back I would prefer to not bother giving them the privilege of saying
they are a developer of Python. Typically this takes a year of regular
contributions for me to believe this.

And lastly, general cohesion with the other committers. Once you
become a committer you become a co-worker in a way and that means
getting along with everybody. And since we don't have some manager who
forces a new co-worker down our throats we tend to be very picky about
this. Plus I already lived through high school and I don't want that
kind of drama here.

So that is my personal criteria on whether or not I speak up for
someone getting commit privileges. How do you play into all of this in
my head? To start, your focus on security, for me at least, goes too
far sometimes. I have disagreed with some of your decisions in the
name of security in the past and I am not quite ready to say that if
you committed something I wouldn't feel compelled to double-check it
to make sure you didn't go too far. This worry, though, has gone down
a lot compared to the last time you asked for commit privs.

And I do worry about your attitude. I remember at one point you
basically threatened to stop helping because your patches were not
been looked at quickly. That really pissed me off personally. You have
improved here and are a lot less abrasive than you were, but I am
still smarting a little from some comments you made a few months back
that came off as pushy.

And as I said, I prefer to give commit privileges to people who I
think will stick around and have been contributing regularly for a
year (I just checked bugs.python.org and it looks like you got really
involved only five months ago). Saying you stopped doing your fuzzing
work simply because the turn-around was not to your liking does not
cause me to instantly think you will stick around when it gets nasty
around here (which in variably does a couple times a year).

In other words I think you are on the right track to get commit
privileges in the future, but just not right now (although if you did
get them right now I wouldn't throw up a roadblock).

-Brett