i am going to have to disagree to an extent. while on the face of it this makes sense. realities are often different. as a FOSS contributor, making the work of

i am going to have to disagree to an extent. while on the face of it this makes sense. realities are often different. as a FOSS contributor, making the work of a maintainer easier can mean the difference between my submission being accepted or rejected. if i want to push a change upstream it is therefore in my interest to not rely on the maintainer to do that work. especially not if that maintainer is a volunteer. not every contributor is going to do that, nor should every contributor do that. only those that have sufficient experience to work at the level of the maintainer, but simply are not the designated maintainer because it is not their project. the same holds true at work. i expect everyone in a team to be familiar with the whole project and be capable of doing the work of the maintainer, at least everyone at senior level. whether they end up doing it or not. having a single person be responsible for all merges is an idea that i do not agree with. among other reasons it causes the designated maintainer to become a gatekeeper preventing others from developing that skill and step up to do that kind of work. whether it is practical for the maintainer to do all the integration then is a matter of their workload. the suggestion that only the designated maintainer can do a good job at merging is even somewhat patronizing. on tag vs branch, this seems to me only makes sense if we are developing against a release branch. a development branch often does not have release tags. the "releases" in a development branch are the merges of new feature branches. if each feature is merged on completion then there should not be any work in progress commits anyways. even if rebasing is used, those commits will be pushed all at once, so HEAD is always at a completed feature. i think that these are simply different approaches to development, and it can't be said that one is better than the other. it comes down to preference. i favor an environment where everyone can step up to contribute to the extent of their experience and knowledge over an environment where my capacity is limited by my role. being told that i am not capable of doing something because it is not part of my role is not something i want to hear ever.