Such confusion is IMO caused by the fact that Orbit is (technically)
not open to contributions.
Indeed, in order to contribute to Orbit, you need to first be a
committer to Orbit, because contributing to Orbit involves many
repository manipulations that can't be easily tested locally. As
opposed to other projects, most Orbit committers (including me) are
committers just by convenience with usage of CVS repo as they needed
to include a library once, rather than by involvement in the project
as opposed to the principle of meritocracy; and although Orbit has
an army of committers, few are actually contributing to the project.
In this condition, it seems unfair to me that someone who wants to
add a library to Orbit gets refused to contribute because they're
not a committer on another project. Just like it seems unfair to
make someone a committer just for a single contribution. No need to
be a committer to be a worthy contributor.
I think if we want Orbit to be an easier project which relies on
meritocracy, we need to think about having a way to enable
contribution of patches to Orbit, and let anyone submit patches, and
a few ones merge them (not reviewing them wouldn't hurt since
current changes aren't reviewed anyway).
Moving to more mainstream technologies such as Git (
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=349048 ) and maybe
Tycho would make it easier to turn contributions into patches and
test them locally or automatically. So it would overall allow Orbit
to take advantage from efforts that contributors-non-committers are
willing to offer.
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