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I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

jakewins.com

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Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#51

Post by mbrock »

I've been using the Ratpoison window manager for more than ten years now, and I love it a lot.

Back in like 2003, I wanted to check out the CVS repository, probably because of some new feature, but the read-only CVS server at Savannah or whatever was down... so I asked in #ratpoison if someone could send me a tarball.

Instead, one of the authors and maintainers just gave me an account on the commit server, mostly out of laziness I think.

But it felt nice to be trusted. Loyal user ever since.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#53

Post by andersonmvd »

mjs7231 wrote: post #14

Ha, Same thing happened to me with the SAME contributor!! Benjamin Bach is an awesome dude. He helped me maintain django-dbbackup for quite some time then we found a third contributor, Anthony Monthe, who is also very interested in the project and I would say owns it now. It's been maintained by those two for quite some time now. I wish there was a way for me to buy them both a bunch of rounds of beer. :D

Benjamin Bach seems to be awesome, however there are few people like him. Chances are your contributor won't be a Benjamin Bach. If the majority were like him, I'm sure we would have much less abandoned open source projects, but the majority isn't like him. Expect the worst and slight possibility of turning out like what the author described.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#54

Post by jakewins »

mjs7231 wrote: post #14

Ha, Same thing happened to me with the SAME contributor!! Benjamin Bach is an awesome dude. He helped me maintain django-dbbackup for quite some time then we found a third contributor, Anthony Monthe, who is also very interested in the project and I would say owns it now. It's been maintained by those two for quite some time now. I wish there was a way for me to buy them both a bunch of rounds of beer. :D

Haha, I'm so glad you shared that, that makes the story even better! I don't know Benjamin beyond our short interaction dealing with moving the repo around, but yeah he seems like an awesome dude.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#55

Post by matt_wulfeck »

chris_wot wrote: post #46
jlgaddis wrote: post #31

I was introduced to open source software in 1996 and have been a huge advocate since. About five years ago, I decided to quit my job and, shortly thereafter, went out in search of a project I could contribute to in my spare time (which was now much more abundant). I quickly discovered that a particular piece of software I used daily wasn't really being maintained all that well, despite the fact that there were severa…

You really should tell us what the software is so we can know to avoid it or perhaps find your changes, fork the project and reapply them then push to have distorts switch to this new version. Worked well for a number of projects where developers are jerks and don't allow other talented and dedicated contributors to participate.

Agree. This is an open source project and I'd like to know the name of it. Not for public shaming but so I can know what to avoid.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#56

Post by drspacemonkey »

goflyapig wrote: post #9
raphman wrote: post #5

> I don’t recall the author now, but the gist of the argument made was that we’re too protective of our code - if you give someone responsibility, show that you trust them, more often than not, your intuition about people abusing their freedom is way off. Maybe it was some of Pieter Hintjens writing and/or the C4 process: * https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/ * http://hintjens.com/blog:112 * http://hintjens.com/blog:1…

I'd guess it was this: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417

I'm gonna say you're probably right. I read the same thing years ago, and it was the first thing that popped into my head reading this.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#57

Post by perlgeek »

Let me tell you the story of how I got involved in the Perl 6 community.

I was trying to find out how Perl 6 was progressing, and found a broken link on a related website (pugscode.org, now defunct). So I went into the #perl6 IRC channel to report it.

Within three minutes, Audrey Tang (to become minister without portfolio in Taiwan in October) had committed a fix, somehow found an email address of mine, and sent me a commit bit to the central SVN repo that contained the Pugs project (the Perl 6 implementation in Haskell she was working on), the source to various websites, the Perl 6 test suite, and a lot of other stuff around the ecosystem. Just because I reported a broken link.

It was the most inclusive community I've ever experienced.

They had written a custom web app to manage email-based invites to an SVN repo, where everybody with commit access could invite somebody else.

Today, we try to carry on her inclusiveness, and give just about everybody who wants write access to all repos of the perl6 organization on github. We have a github team with more than 220 members and about 40 repos, including the Perl 6 design documents, the official test suite, the perl6.org website and the official docs. I haven't heard of a single instance of vandalism or other misuse of the trust.

Want to contribute to Perl 6? Just tell me your github username!

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#59

Post by eliaspro »

perlgeek wrote: post #57

Let me tell you the story of how I got involved in the Perl 6 community. I was trying to find out how Perl 6 was progressing, and found a broken link on a related website (pugscode.org, now defunct). So I went into the #perl6 IRC channel to report it. Within three minutes, Audrey Tang (to become minister without portfolio in Taiwan in October) had committed a fix, somehow found an email address of mine, and sent me a…

Small OpenSource world.

I remember you suddenly starting huge PRs with massive improvements to the OTRS code base. Although I don't use and contribute to OTRS that much anymore due to the increasing "Open Core" business model around it, your contributions taught me a lot and significantly improved my Perl and OTRS experience.

Re: I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know

#60

Post by emmelaich »

perlgeek wrote: post #57

Let me tell you the story of how I got involved in the Perl 6 community. I was trying to find out how Perl 6 was progressing, and found a broken link on a related website (pugscode.org, now defunct). So I went into the #perl6 IRC channel to report it. Within three minutes, Audrey Tang (to become minister without portfolio in Taiwan in October) had committed a fix, somehow found an email address of mine, and sent me a…

Same! I got a commit bit after a few minutes of chatting on #perl6 from Audrey.

I made some reasonable comments, was not obviously an idiot. I was very excited about Perl6 after going to a presentation from Audrey.

Sadly I have never exercised it as I moved from Perl to Python and other since then.

Perl6 may have ruled the world by now if it had gotten popular enough in the early 2000s. Too late now methinks.

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