About 2 years ago I started to work (as contractor) for OpenedHand as full time Poky developer (I did not worked on kernel/applications — just Poky itself). During that time we made few releases, and last of them (‘elroy’) was prepared but never got released (it is present on OH servers anyway). I also worked on upgrading systems used by OH clients.
Now I work for other companies and one of them (Bug Labs) use Poky. We use last official release (‘pinky’) which shows it’s age so we bumped some components to newer versions to get some additional software built. During that we had to fork some classes/recipes to make needed changes. Those changes were available only in Bug Labs repository and I decided to review all of them to get as much as possible merged back into Poky.
I created single patches and started to show them to Richard Purdie to get them accepted. It was hard sometimes but I understand why — there are strict policies for backports in Poky (everything backported has to be present in ‘trunk’ for example). After some of our changes got accepted he created ‘poky-contrib’ repository and gave me access to make it easier in future.
Since then I created few more backports/fixes and all of them were merged. I do not have to show him every patch separately — it is just “please pull” mails to Poky mailing list or similar discussions via Jabber.
Having possibility to easy sharing changes is great thing.