Debian Revolutions ... begin with small steps ...

... let's see if the one I'm seeing right now will be one of those.

Since ages the collab-maint project on Alioth has been configured so that all DDs can commit to its SVN repository. I've always thought this is a good idea and I've always wanted that to be true for all Alioth's collaborative maintenance project, rationale being always the same: DDs are lazy, if I have a patch ready there is nothing more valuable than the ability to commit it right now (together with an appropriate changelog entry of course!).

At Debconf I chatted a bit about that with Sam and Raphael, and we started thinking about how to make that wish a reality. As a first step the Alioth admins agree on giving DD-wide commit permissions to every alioth project asking so. Let me repeat: you can widen to the whole DD body the commit permissions of your collaborative maintenance project on Alioth just asking the alioth admins. It's quick and easy, and I'm confident Debian as a whole will benefit for mass adoption of this good practice.

Raphael has proposed that for adoption to the Python and Perl modules maintenance groups, and it's now implemented for the OCaml maintenance group. Ask that for your beloved collaborative maintenance project!

The next step is to patch the GForge running on Alioth so that project admins can enable such a setting by themselves: I volunteered to work on that, but I'm a bit swamped with other Debian-related stuff, help would be much appreciated!