streamline github dev process

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 30, 2017, at 16:36, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> On May 30, 2017, at 13:23, Helmut K. C. Tessarek wrote:
> 
>> Maybe you could allow maintainers to review and approve other pull requests.
>> 
>> This is git. It's very easy to revert a broken commit. Since almost all
>> of these commits are not conflicting, it's even easier to do so.
>> I believe that we need more comitters, even if you just allow
>> maintainers to commit their own ports.
> 
> It's not allowed to revert a commit that has been pushed. It is possible to push a new commit that undoes the changes of a previous commit. But MacPorts has additional requirements. For example, if you update a port from version 1.0 to version 2.0 and then find that 2.0 is broken, you cannot undo it by making another commit that just changes the port back to version 1.0 again; you must also increase the port's epoch.

Also, in regard to your last sentence there, historically, when we granted commit access to our CVS or Subversion repository, it was access to all of it. We've continued that practice under Git, partly since that's what we've always done, and partly because I'm not aware of a way to restrict committers to a subset of the repository, but that may just be due to my unfamiliarity with Git and GitHub.

The Guide explains why we don't just grant commit access to maintainers the instant they become maintainers. Maintainers need time to build up their experience with nuances of MacPorts development. Until they've done that, we want to review their changes before they get published to users.