> I think I'm entitled to an opinion on the subject because I am a  
> committer, and I cited my experiences in forming my opinion.  (It turns 
> out that I'm not alone in this opinion.)

Of course, but the experience of being a non-committer who still tries
to improve ruby is also important. Honestly, I think it is even more
important. The basic asymmetry of centralized VCSs makes the workflow of
a committer always much better than the one of a non-commiter since the
non-commiters have little access to the VCS services. And one experience
of one non-committer is: it sucks badly.

This is mainly because non-trivial patches (and even trivial ones) tend
to stay quite long in the bug tracker. Which means that you basically
have, as a non-committer, to update your patch over and over again to
the newest HEAD. I did that with svn, it is horrible (you have to do it
by hand). I do that now with git and it works like a charm (thanks to
rebase).

Another thing: maintaining the ChangeLog file. This thing looks very
stupid, and makes merging horrible (you basically always have a conflict
on ChangeLog, for obvious reasons). I thought first that it was a
workaround from the good'ol days of CVS and even started to write a
script that would generate it. Then I realized that it was not doable
with SVN since there are no merges. Stupid.

Sylvain