Ben, the point is that CVS committers *know* how to commit and if you have to download something we can go as well with the patches. The idea is that the core team does not have to go through 140 open patches, download them, test them and then put them back into CVS as this is where our code base is officially maintained and where we run the releases from.
This does not prevent anyone else from making a patch or providing something in the download area.
