Still, not every contributors are committers, they do not have the permission to create branches. How can they let others know they are working on something? Open an issue or send an email to the mailing list right? And usually, the contributor set is much larger than the committer set for a project in ASF, so do not always stand at the position with committer to think of the workflow.
I believe that any un-authorized, un-approved, un-reviewed writes to the repository should never be permitted by anyone unless it is in full compliance with the work flow requirements. All development is in the public eye and subject to review and comment from the PPMC and the whole world.
But I do think we have not discussed how collaborative feature branches should work under the workflow requirements. That is really what we are talking about here. I made an initial stab at feature branch requirements in the last comment at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/NUTTXTEST/Code+Contribution+Workflow+--+Brennan+Ashton under "*Extended Development on a Feature Branch*"
Greg* *
