Community and contribution [was: Re: http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP25]

Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sat Jan 3 04:06:34 PST 2015


On 1 Jan 2015 18:46, "Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d" <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On 29/12/14 05:13, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> I did want to say something about this. I've given a close read to the
"Lost a
>> new commercial user this week" thread, through and through. It seems I've
>> identified a problem that belongs to us. ("Us" is a vacuous term meaning
"the
>> leaders of the D community").
>>
>> My initial read of your complaint went like this: it's about Windows (I
don't
>> even have an installation), it's about vibe.d (haven't used it yet), and
it's
>> also discussing documentation (which is something we can indeed improve
and I
>> know how to). So a large part of the problem wasn't even mine to work on.
>>
>> Others harbored similar perceptions. The corollary has been that
essentially
>> you're asking them to stop working on D aspects they do care about and
start
>> working on D aspects you and others care about - all on their free time.
>
>
> A few thoughts on this.  (This turned a bit longer than expected in the
writing, so I've highlighted some TL;DR sections to highlight key ideas.)
>
> I think that one of the most common sources of community friction in open
source is people mistaking being _asked_ to work on something that someone
else cares about, for being _expected_ to do so.
>
> That's very unfortunate, because it means that all too often people will
come into a community, full of enthusiasm for this new thing they've
discovered, make some suggestions, and get shot down like they're some sort
of plague carrier. (The D community is pretty good at not doing this with
newcomers, but deals less well with people repeatedly raising ideas; more
on that in a moment.)
>
> Obviously, there are people who display an enormous sense of entitlement,
who are rude or just throw demands around in a very arrogant way.  But
simply saying, "I want this", "I need this", or "I think this would be a
good idea" should not IMO be a trigger for criticism or hostility.  Most of
the time, people do understand the fundamental constraints of a volunteer
community with limited resources, and what they are interested in having is
either acknowledgement of a good idea or use-case (preferably with
something getting onto a TODO list, but not necessarily with any priority),
or feedback that helps them understand alternative ways to solve their
problem.  (Caveat: it matters whether the problem is actually solved, or
just worked around.)
>

I've stopped here (I'm reading from a phone and travelling), but some
thoughts come to mind when it comes to persistent offenders/questions.

1. DIPs should be process of getting a new feature / breaking change
through - not the ML.

People who want changes strong enough should be encouraged to raise one.

2. Why does D not do X? And other frequent questions should go in a FAQ
with a clear answer.  This hopefully isn't the rule but I sense sometimes
the reason certain things come up again and again are because either of the
following:

a. Responses vary or change over time.  So the original reason and
motivation for rejection gets lost.

b. There is no official rejection stamp for ideas that spring up from the
ML compared to DIPs.

Having this in a FAQ serves the purposes of both (a) and (b).

3. Bounties were supposed to address some aspects of feature driven goals.

I don't think this works in practice but the thought process seemed sound,
in terms of:

a.  Someone has an idea and raises it in the ML.
b. A DIP is created, along with a bugzilla report and bounty.
c. More bounties that go in drives popularity and the likelihood of a PR
being raised to implement the DIP.

I don't have an alternate proposal to this, but I recognize that upvotes in
bugzilla don't drive incentives either.

Though you may have raised some good points on these. :)

Iain.
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