GvR on commit privileges

I wrote this post in 2010, more than 14 years ago. It may be very out of date, partially or totally incorrect. I may even no longer agree with this, or might approach things differently if I wrote this post today. I rarely edit posts after writing them, but if I have there'll be a note at the bottom about what I changed and why. If something in this post is actively harmful or dangerous please get in touch and I'll fix it.

Guido van Rossum:

Maybe we’ve been too careful with only giving commit privileges to to experienced and trusted new developers. I spoke to Ezio Melotti and from his experience with getting commit privileges, it seems to be a case of “the lion is much more afraid of you than you are afraid of the lion”. I.e. having got privileges he was very concerned about doing something wrong, worried about the complexity of SVN, and so on. Since we’ve got lots of people watching the commit stream, I think that there really shouldn’t need to be a worry at all about a new committer doing something malicious, and there shouldn’t be much worry about honest beginners’ mistakes either – the main worry remains that new committers don’t use their privileges enough. So, my recommendation (which surely is a turn-around of my own attitude in the past) is to give out more commit privileges sooner.

(Emphasis added.)