Why would he put something bad? Being malicious?
Yes. Sure, for most people the hurdle is likely to high to go that route, but OTOH it a great way to get bad code out to lots of systems quickly (and a way to ruin our fame)
Linux has been mostly immune to malware. For anyone writing malware one of the challenges is propagating the infected code.
So lets not give bad folks the perfect vehicle for distributing their malware through an official update channel which automatically gets pushed to tens of thousands of machines with the implication of being clean software. Such an event would be devastating to the entire open source community.
If one doesn't think this is going to happen or you think the ultimate consequences for open source adoption would be benign then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Also, if you think the bar to getting a Fedora account is so high as to make this unlikely then you've forgotten that anyone with enough software savvy to write malware would view that hurdle as a house of straw.
If you think there aren't plenty of folks the world over just waiting for their 15 minutes of hacker fame or who have a desire to teach RedHat/Fedora a lesson then I can offer you a discount on that bridge.
Do we need a better mechanism for accepting contributions from the community, probably. Are open commit lists the answer, no.
If you think the problem would be mitigated by package maintainers rigorously reviewing all changes *after* they've been committed you're forgetting human nature and the fact most maintainers are over worked to begin with. By extension if you demand maintainers review every commit then how is that effectively different than the current process of posting a patch in a bugzilla and asking the maintainer to review it before committing it?
-- John Dennis <jdennis@xxxxxxxxxx> -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
