I was actually just writing a reply to that mailing list post finally.
But I agree that we need a little more development focus.
The question is how should we manage it? I suppose we could set up a list of things to do and let people choose jobs, and keep track of who's doing what. At one time we had a bug tracker, that might (or might not) help.
Several people have SVN write access. Mostly it includes people who work on tracks, cars, packages, or code. Mainly people get SVN access by writing good patches which I get tired of applying for them.
Or by simply asking...I'm not too picky about it. After all, this encourages development and if people check in something that is broken it can always be rolled back. In fact there are some people I've been thinking about adding...
About the mailing list: It seems like it has its good points and bad. On one hand, it's nice to get the developers' attention, as they don't all regularly check the forums or get on IRC. However it also is hard to follow conversations and replies (at least harder than forums), and people are less likely to respond.
The Development forum was meant as a place to discuss new features as they are added and changed, I like the idea of having a topic dedicated to a certain item. This is the place for developers to post their changes, and for users to post what they think about the changes. Also discussion about future changes goes there. I'm not sure I see how a private developer forum would be better than what we have now.
