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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

#61

Post by rwmj »

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…

I think the most interesting part of your story is that Taiwan now has a minister "placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means" who actually knows about computers! Something that seems as if it would never happen here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career

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

#62

Post by cygx »

emmelaich wrote: post #60
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.

Too late now methinks.

Who knows. Remember, it took more than 10 years for Python to get popular...

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

#63

Post by rmchugh »

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

He's a personal friend, i can buy him a beer on your behalf ;). I think he makes it work because he works part time and uses the rest of his time on open source projects. He could easily be earning far more if he worked full time, but this is what he prioritises.

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

#64

Post by seanp2k2 »

rwmj wrote: post #61
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…

I think the most interesting part of your story is that Taiwan now has a minister "placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means" who actually knows about computers! Something that seems as if it would never happen here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career

Yeah, I'd be very surprised if anyone in congress could even spell IRC, let alone be an active contributing member of a programming community. It's a shame that the people who are making the biggest decisions about the legality and future of all this stuff largely have no idea what they're dealing with or have any clue how any of it works.

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

#65

Post by h1d »

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…

I don't want to sound too negative but doesn't this look like they were in need of volunteers even by risking the repo's integrity by allowing total strangers commit access from lack of commitment from the real core team?

It almost sounds like perl6 is a publically writeable repo.

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

#66

Post by h1d »

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.

+1 mentioning the project

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

#67

Post by avar »

h1d wrote: post #65
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…

I don't want to sound too negative but doesn't this look like they were in need of volunteers even by risking the repo's integrity by allowing total strangers commit access from lack of commitment from the real core team? It almost sounds like perl6 is a publically writeable repo.

What do you think the risk is? That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s?

Sure, that's possible, but good contributors will vastly outnumber bad contributors, and such a person's commit access would be revoked instantly. There's still code review for everything, and such a change would not go unnoticed.

Just look at Wikipedia. That's the equivalent of a publically writeable repo and hasn't turned into a total shitshow as a result.

As the Perl 6 ecosystem demonstrates you get way more out of inclusiveness than being paranoid about some hypothetical bad actor getting access to your repo.

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

#68

Post by ycensorator »

avar wrote: post #67
h1d wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound too negative but doesn't this look like they were in need of volunteers even by risking the repo's integrity by allowing total strangers commit access from lack of commitment from the real core team? It almost sounds like perl6 is a publically writeable repo.

What do you think the risk is? That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s? Sure, that's possible, but good contributors will vastly outnumber bad contributors, and such a person's commit access would be revoked instantly. There's still code review for everything, and such a change would not go unnoticed. Just look at Wikipedia. That's the equ…

I don't think there is nearly as much code review in open source projects as people would like to think.

Then there is the problem of churn if the new committers get confident and rewrite minor things, which is quite taxing on the existing committers.

Wikipedia is a good example that a small number of people either have to guard their territory ferociously or else have everything rewritten.

Now, sometimes a rewrite is in order, but in general churn is a major time sink for longer term committers and in fact one of the reasons they ultimately leave.

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

#69

Post by pepijndevos »

To offer a different perspective: I did this with a library that's mostly used for short lived hacks, so while there are contributions from time to time, no one sticks with it for long enough to become a real maintainer. So I'm still the one pressing the merge button on new PRs.

A long time ago I wrote PyMouse, which someone added keyboard support to, which became PyUserInput. But then I ended up being the maintainer of the new combined project. So lately I've just been giving contributors commit access. So far the results are OK, but it's not like anyone took over the maintenance.

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

#70

Post by chris_wot »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #55
chris_wot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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