In order to gain access to a commit bit for Adium, you must first provide a few things:

New Developers

New developers will need to create a few patches, which will be reviewed by the Adium Development Team. You will need to provide enough patches until at least 3-4 team members are comfortable with you gaining a commit bit. Due to the randomness of patch sizes, this number will vary. This is comparable to a probation period for an employer: it's just to make sure that you are comfortable with the project, and that we're comfortable with you.

Returning Developers

Hurray, you've come back! We welcome anyone who previously worked on Adium to come back.

However, we do need to make sure that you're ready to go, since you may have adapted to another project's coding style and become rusty with our own CodingStyle.

So, if you are gone from the project for 6 months or longer, you'll need to provide roughly 2-3 patches before we'll restore your commit access. We will audit your patches to make sure that you are comfortable with the codebase again, and to allow folks to review your code to make sure you still know how things work inside Adium and its frameworks. Also, if you have been gone for a prolonged period of time, the entire team may have changed.

This is comparable to an employer rehiring an employee and giving them a probation period.