I got so much flack for suggesting a year ago on a repo. The 'maintainer' came back with the point that he/she gave commit access to everyone-ish. The problem with that is you will get very aggressive individuals who will commit, and then others who will revert and this cat<->mouse game continues on until the community suffers, the project dead.
Just some food for thought.
I think all these experiments are worthy. Who knows what will happen but lets try.
> The problem with that is you will get very aggressive individuals who will commit, and then others who will revert and this cat<->mouse game continues on until the community suffers, the project dead.
Which is exactly how wikipedia works (with the concept of admins who can protect pages, though). I wonder if this could apply to FOSS development.
If the community is not functional - i.e. people can't find consensus on patches - I don't think automatic solution can fix it. It can enable functioning community to handle things better - i.e., enable to hold votes more efficiently if the community is into voting, or enable to process patches more quickly if it's ok for the community to merge them. But if some people want the patch in and some want it out, automatic merge is not going to solve it - only to piss off those who want it out and alienate them from the project. And give others feeling that it's ok to force decisions through without hearing out the others.
Just some food for thought.
I think all these experiments are worthy. Who knows what will happen but lets try.