Janine,
I agree with you that the requirement of having to submit patches risks becoming a bottleneck. We have seen that patches are not being committed quickly enough in the Bug Tracker. I think that people with commit rights should be allowed to make bug fixes without having to submit a patch first. Other parts of the
cvs guidelines are still worth thinking about though, i.e. preserve upgradability, respect code freezes, keep code simple, be careful about what you are committing etc.
