Git Scratch-Pads for every identity.kde.org account (not only developers)

[Eike Hein]

On 1/1/2011 10:28 PM, Milian Wolff wrote:
> Is this how it should be? How was this in SVN times? Did people also start new
> work somewhere else and waited for the time it was kde-review-able to merge it
> into KDE?

The policy to get a KDE developer account (-> write access to all
of SVN, and now also git) hasn't changed in a very long time. You
are required to state a  convincing reason for why you want the
account and can optionally name an existing dev account as a
supporter, who is then automatically asked by mail to verify his support.

When it comes to determining whether the stated reason is convin-
cing a huge factor is citing any prior successful contributions.
The point is that KDE is team work, so we look for evidence that
the holder of the new dev account has already gathered some ex-
perience working with others in KDE and so has gotten an idea of
the social etiquette and processes involved (having a supporter
goes a long away towards proving this and thus the quality of the 
written reason becomes less important at that point).

That's in their interest as much as the project's as it either
avoids someone unknown suddenly committing to your codebase, or
if someone is committing to your codebase who is indeed unknown
to you you can at least expect that he has a certain level of
familiarity with how things work in KDE.

It's also a mechanism to ensure that stuff served up under a
*.kde.org domain name isn't random crap (this issue is relevant
to your proposal, btw; if you want to see anything like it done,
please come up with a solid plan in this area that can be im-
plemented with the available manpower).

Sometimes dev accounts are also granted for the purpose of comit-
ting entirely new works to playground even without naming a
supporter, but only when the written reason is really solid and
indicates someone who knows what he's doing and appears respon-
sible.

Notably that's a much lower barrier to entry than in probably
most other FOSS projects (which I think is a good thing, btw).


-- 
Best regards,
Eike Hein