Commit access to the repository is granted to people who are trusted to have good understanding of:
- Our coding style
- The way we discuss things together and reach decisions in a peaceful way
- The shared vision we have of what Haiku should be and the direction we should work on
This is granted through public proposals to the haiku-development mailing list after one of the existing commiters sends a proposal to add someone.
While X512 has done a lot of work so far, at least the first condition is not met, as patches consistently have several coding style problems, with apparently not a lot of motivation to go back on older commxts and fix the problems. There was also communication difficulties as they didn’t use IRC and mailing lists, which is one of the places where a lot of discussions happen. I think this latter part is now fixed, with the use of a Matrix bridge for IRC access.
As long as at least the coding style aspect is not resolved, the process will not go further.
Both of these problems resulted in some frustration for everyone. Communication issues result in misunderstanding. Code that does not follow the coding style requires a lot of work to clean up, and there is pressure on the commiters to get things merged when it blocks a big new feature like the risc-v pomt. Eventually we decided to merge the code anyway. Kallisti5 fixed several coding style problems in the platform-shared code, and the risc-v specific code is in a “we need to clean this up later” state.
This approach results in improvements in the short term (we get a risc-v port!) but it adds technical debt (code that we need to rework later). And people who do the clean up may introduce bugs (as with any change to the code). The resulting perception is that X512 is the cool developer working on new features, and whoever decides to do the cleanup appears to be breaking things (as you complained earlier).
So that’s why no one has proposed X512 for commit access yet. Note that other people regularly get commit access (I think the most r cent one was madmax, and before that Kyle Ambroff-Kao). Their patches were not as large, but were better in following the coding guidelines. We value the quality of changes over the quantity.
It is understandable that the work on a new architecture port requires a lot of experimentation and it is not possible to do it cleanly in the first try. You have to try things, make mistakes and go back. And it’s not always obvious how to get that ready for code review. I’m sure that now with the first set of patches merged, we have a better base to work on and if X512 continues work from there, we can consider granting them commxt access soon when we feel that the conditions are met.