i don’t think that’s true. there have definitely been non-staff contributors in the past, and staff have definitely offered extra assistance in the past to get folks set up with a dev environment.
i think the reality is that the system is sufficiently large and complex that it will probably take even the best coders out there some time to set things up, plus additional time to learn the conventions and nuances of the existing codebase.
so i think the way things like this go, it’s really a calculation in potential contributors’ minds whether they realistically have the time to set up a dev environment and then do enough coding to justify the startup effort. for me that’s the calculation that’s prevented me from moving forward. even though i don’t claim to be a great coder, i think i could help, but because i have basically zero Ruby skills, even if i have touched most of the other languages and other stuff before, i figure it still would probably take me at least a good week to even push out my first easy bug fix (assuming that i actually will test out my code myself before handing it off).
(i think there have been a few cases where the fix was very obvious and could be fixed with just a line or two, and i’m guessing folks have just checked in code without actually testing it, but that’s something that i’d be uneasy doing myself.)
it may be worth looking at some past discussion related to folks potentially contributing code: