Re: Unapproved changes

["William Jon McCann" <mccann jhu edu>]

Hi,

On 3/12/07, Christian Kirbach <christian kirbach googlemail com> wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:14:49 +0100, William Jon McCann <mccann jhu edu>
> wrote:
> > Seems like you made a change to gnome-screensaver yesterday [1]
> > without approval.
>
> True.
>
> > As you should know the standard protocol is that all patches require
> > approval from the package maintainer.  The procedure for submitting
> > patches is detailed in the README.  And anyone who has ever submitted
> > a patch knows that I generally review patches promptly.  It is not
> > your responsibility to determine what needs changing when and whether
> > it requires approval.  Doing this the day before a release is pretty
> > uncool.  I'll appreciate your attention to this in the future.
>
> While working on our latest GnomeGoal[2] I ended up in a dilemma.
> While some maintainers got upset for being disturbed by proposing such
> rather non-intrusive changes on bugzilla[3] and people on #gnome-hackers
> suggested to just commit them, some maintainers got upset when I started
> committing without proposing patches. This is not an encouraging situation.
> I was well aware that the 2.18 tarball preparation was just a day ahead
> and worked extra cautious. This certainly does not justify my actions.
>
> Anyways, I apologise for the inapropriate actions taken by me. I hope I
> will not cause any future trouble for you or for the release team to which
> this issue has been escalated. I appreciate your efforts to quickly review
> patches as I believe this strongly encourages contributors.
> I hope I can still be a useful Gnome foundation member.

Thank you for your reply.  I'm sure this won't happen again.

Even the most trivial change can have unexpected results:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417538

This would have been quite unfortunately if it had slipped into the
release.  This is one reason why we have a protocol for freeze breaks
and maintainer reviews.

Thanks,
Jon