SCALE: Developing a project community

I remember reading a while ago about one OSS project that ran most of their infrastructure with the Puppet configuration system. The puppet scripts were in a version control system, and volunteer sysadmins could post patches or be given commit rights.

Sounded like a great idea - allowing people to contribute to a very time-consuming and important part of a project in exactly the same way as the "code developers" do. And most mistakes can be detected via "patch review" or handled by rolling back a commit. In theory at least.

I wonder how that worked out in the longer term..