On 22/03/07, Manuel Schneider <manuel.schneider(a)wikimedia.ch> wrote: Not so. I came on to IRC and advised you of the situation. When you failed to answer the question I posed, and failed to acknowledge the mistake, I made it explicitly clear what the situation is. Manuel, we have conventions for working on the code base which are a lot looser than a vast number of open source projects which are designed for "release", but we still have a release process, and it ought to be followed in order to help combat regressions or serious bugs entering the stable branches. The team at large, and especially myself, have learned this the hard way. You claimed that the fix in question was "critical" when it was not, and gave no indication that you intended to undo the changes. You then stated your intention to ignore my advice, which is completely inappropriate and thoroughly obnoxious. [We got off on the wrong foot, but it doesn't mean we have to continue running on it.] All new committers should have read http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access - I would have thought that making this mistake implied you did not read this information, which is frankly unacceptable. We are exceptionally grateful for any and all coding help, but it's all about gauging trust and competence, and if you're asked to read a document, then it is a basic courtesy to do so. [If the existence of this page was not made clear to you, then I apologise.] I've made a lot of mistakes during my involvement with the development team, including a nasty merge of broken functionality into a release branch prior to point-release time. This left a security vulnerability in an old released version of the software. We no longer have such gaping and fragile release policies, and so these need to be applied and enforced consistently. I'm certainly not calling for anyone to have their privileges revoked, so don't make that assumption, but what I do think needs to be said is that people need to stop, read up on how we operate, and appreciate that when you dabble in the core code, you're no longer exclusively on your own (extensions, some i18n) turf, and if you break a release, then there is a problem. Consistency of released "stable" code is what the release manager's job is, and we only have one. Don't let's give him any additional stress. Rob Church