[kde-community] Proposal: KDE Manifesto wording revision

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, November 11, 2013 10:34:09 Eike Hein wrote:
> There's two halves to the access model:
> 
> * All KDE contributor accounts must have direct write access. (There

we all agree on this point, it is therefore unnecessary to go into this 
further.

it is the ONLY clause:

> * Only KDE contributor accounts may have direct write access. That
>   means if your code is in a place that in theory allows giving
>   others access, you're not allowed to do so.

this is unenforceable, and probably not even measurable.

again, we can observe that by examining it in terms of being a tautology:

only people with direct write access to git.kde.org can change the code on 
git.kde.org. (repeat for any other kde hosted service)

if there was a theoretical repository on git-hub for the (also theoretical) 
kde-foo project, writes to that repository could still not find their way into 
git.kde.org unless somone with write access pushes it there.

this is, in fact, exactly what we do every single day on reviewboard.kde.org: 
we proxy changes for others.

so: “if your code is in a place that in theory allows giving others access” 
becomes “if your code is in place that in theory allows giving others access, 
that code still requires a KDE contributor account to approve of those changes 
before they reach git.kde.org. therefore, if your code is in a place that in 
theory allows giving others access, only KDE contributors accounts may have 
direct write access to the git.kde.org repository.”

iow, it has solved nothing.

worse, if we actually were to try and enforce this in a meaningful fashion, it 
could only be done in a way that would interfere with reviewboard and similar 
patch review systems.


perhaps what you are trying to say is:

	the canonical version of the project is hosted on KDE infrastructure

now *that* makes sense because it means that to be a KDE project then it must 
be hosted within the KDE infrastructure .. which in turn means that for any 
contributions to make it into the canonical version of that project which come 
from by means other than direct access must be approved by a KDE contributor 
account.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo