[Gnu-arch-users] practical questions of archive ownership

[Joshua Haberman]

Thanks for all the answers to my last question, asking if changesets can
provide the facility to "push" changes as "cvs diff -u > patch" can. 
This question is similar in that I am still trying to figure out how
arch's capabilities can support the development models that projects
using CVS have come to expect.

The Arch-managed projects I am aware of seem to have a main author who
owns the authoritative archive and branch/version for that project.  For
example, Tom's archive/branch is authoritative for tla.  To accept any
contributions, the project leader manually (AFAIK) merges from the
contributor's branch.  Nothing makes it into the authoritative version
unless the project leader pulls changes from contributors.

In this scenario, only the project leader has write access to the
archive that hosts the authoritative branch/version.

What about projects where a group of core contributors all have direct
write access to a CVS repository in the status quo?  The authoritative
branch does not logically belong to any individual, it belongs to the
group of people who trust each other to make changes to the project. 
Any of the core group should be able to make changes to the
authoritative branch/version without having to go through someone else.

Is it reasonable to make the authoritative archive for such a project
writable by all the core contributors?  With multiple people having
write access to the same archive, will arch keep track of who changed
what?

I know that the "Arch way" is to create branches for everything, and so
perhaps it will be suggested that each contributor should have their own
archive and branch.  Even assuming this is true there is still the
question of who will have write access to the authoritative archive to
be able to merge from individuals' branches.  It would be undesirable to
make one person responsible for doing all the merging into the
authoritative archive, so we again have the desire to make archives
writable by more than one person.

Josh