On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 08:58:18PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> For people who don't have commit rights, there is both Mantis or 
> commit-by-proxy which reinstates the SqC model of having a champion for 
> your change. I.e., to commit something you can ask someone else to 
> commit your change but that person implicitly takes responsibility for 
> your change and will be the person who gets blamed for it and is 
> expected to take care of it (and they may loose their commit rights if 
> the change they commit is complete crap). To me, that is a useful 
> intermediate state because the proxy acts as a mentor to teach the 
> original author about how to provide changes, make sure it's okay etc.

This sounds like a good approach. It provides a way to get things done,
and a process for ensuring that things get done right. As someone who
has occasionally submitted both good patches and complete crap, I value
both ;) I also think that it is much easier to put crap in than to take
it out, so controlling this well is important.

> For users of Squeak there would be an update process which (although 
> much slower than the update stream of the days of yore) would allow 
> people to keep track of the ongoing changes and (for forks) merge those 
> changes as desired along the way using Monticello.

As a consumer of the update process, I like the update stream (based
on change sets) a *lot*. As a developer, Monticello is indispensable.
Is there some simple way we could get both, such that each new
commit to a Monticello repository can produce a change set relative
to its predecessor, with the comment text from the Monticello version
forming the preamble of the change set? Perhaps this is something
that already exists (or maybe it's an itch I should go scratch?).

> What do people think about this as a straw-man?

I like it.

Dave