2015 H1 Vision

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Sunday, February 01, 2015 08:41:54 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 2/1/15 7:48 AM, Mathias LANG wrote:
> > This is arguably the most well-defined goal here, but at the same time,
> > it sounds strange to judge the contributions by the numbers of pull
> > request. We could top that number -and I'm afraid we'll be tempted to do
> > so- by submitting a streamline of pull requests fixing trivial doc
> > problems / mispelling (I'm not saying docs P.R. are worthless), or
> > implementing trivial functions.
>
> Yah, Walter is also unconvinced of such metrics. There's anecdotal
> evidence the use of simple metrics could go either way, the risk for
> abuse being obvious.
>
> However lack of measurable metrics on account of them being open to
> abuse may lead to lack of progress. I've had excellent experience with
> good use of metrics and proxies, and I trust our community there's
> little motivation to look good by playing the numbers.

I would think that an open source community of volunteers would stand a
better chance of avoiding some of the negatives of tracking various metrics,
because the monetary compensation, promotion opportunities, etc. that such
things can affect in a full-time job are not normally present in an open
source project. There are likely other ways that they could lead to bad
behavior that would affect us, but in general, I think that the odds that
tracking metrics and pushing for their improvement will cause problems are
fairly low. Now, they may not help particularly either, but I see no harm in
trying. We can always stop if we find that it's causing problems.

- Jonathan M Davis