• she/her, it/its

gay ass artist and programmer, i guess. 23. works on botania, the minecraft mod. also into weird functional programming stuff. talk to me about monads (or applicatives if you're even cooler)


fullmoon
@fullmoon

One trick I've learned from Edward Kmett is the policy of handing out the commit bit liberally for the open source projects I maintain. It doesn't even matter if they are active contributors or not or even if they're interested in the commit bit. Just hand out commit privileges like candy to anyone who even just looks astray at your repository

The worst case scenario (which has literally never happened to me) is that they screw things up, and if that happens you can just force push your local copy of the repository to fix things.

The vast majority of the time what actually happens is one of the following three scenarios:

  • they completely lose interest in the repository

    … in which case no harm is done. You don't even need to revoke their privileges when that happens because sometimes:

  • they occasionally wake up from being "dormant" to help out

    Sometimes you're not available to merge a PR, cut a release, or whatever and someone who happened to have the commit bit lying around will randomly chip in to help review or merge something once in a blue moon, but otherwise still not actively contribute. It's super helpful when this happens so having a large reserve pool of mostly inactive contributors is actually way more useful than you think.

  • they rise to the occasion and become deeply invested in the project

    A lot of the time if you trust people they will do their level best to honor the trust you've placed in them and become amazing stewards of the project. This is also a great way to network and meet new people you wouldn't have otherwise met before.


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in reply to @fullmoon's post:

I've never heard "commit bit" before. Is it "bit" as in 1/8 of a byte as in on or off as in either has commit privileges or doesn't? Or something else?

Also,

A lot of the time if you trust people they will do their level best to honor the trust you've placed in them

One time someone asked me to help them with something on their Google Drive. Instead of sharing folders they just straight up gave me their login details. You bet I was tiptoeing around that section of cyberspace out of a sense to return that respect!

I suspect (although @leftpaddotpy may be correct as well about an SCM system at some point) that it's just one of those things programmers started saying to make their terminology "more programmer-y".

Why say "commit privileges" when you can refer to it as a "bit" since it's a boolean value that could (theoretically) be stored in a single bit?

You just feel cooler saying it.