maintainer timeout for FreeBSD commiters

[Chris Rees]

On 18 Jul 2012 07:44, "John Marino" <freebsdml at marino.st> wrote:
>
> On 7/18/2012 00:43, Mark Linimon wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 12:09:50AM +0200, John Marino wrote:
>>>
>>> Would it be so bad if all my submitted patches (as a recognized
>>> quality contributor with history) just got committed as a passthrough?
>>
>>
>> This has been explored on the mailing lists before, however, we don't
>> technically have a way to do either of the following:
>>
>>   - let people commit to "just some" ports
>>   - have any patches be autocommitted
>>
>> No one has ever tackled the former problem.  The latter problem just
>> seems to me to open up ways for people to abuse the system.  It makes
>> me nervous.
>
>
> Well, between the two I would suggest a combination of "let people
autocommit patches to "just some" ports".
>
> Reasons - Don't have to hassle with the logistics of giving a limited
commit bit, risk getting the permissions wrong, and removing it after the
maintainer retires.
>
> You'd have to create an automatic system that could verify the patches
apply cleanly (or maybe just accept file replacements), and that the files
came from maintainer.  A public/private key system should do that.  All
you'd need to do is is map keys to ports and not accept any files outside
of the allowed area.  Removing that mapping is a lot easier than tweaking
commit privileges.
>
> Yes, somebody would have to set that up but it would pay big dividend I
think.

It also does away with the QA aspect that committers currently provide.
I'd like to repeat that people sufficiently familiar with the ports system
to QA patches generally ends up with a commit bit fairly quickly.

Chris