Generality creep

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Monday, 1 April 2019 at 23:22:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 3/31/19 8:01 PM, Mike Franklin wrote:
>> On Sunday, 31 March 2019 at 16:18:35 UTC, Rubn wrote:
>> 
>>> Look at this comment as someone pointed out before:
>>>
>>> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8557#pullrequestreview-149952733
>> 
>> Yes, Andrei's review was a bit too strong but he did change 
>> course later in that thread.  Also recognize that the original 
>> author did not provide much motivation or justification 
>> (though, I'm guilty of that too).
>
> Those were unnecessarily strong words.
>
> Allow me to give a bit more context whilst clarifying I am not 
> defending or condoning that attitude.
>
> That comment came after a few phone conversations whereby 
> Walter mentioned he has a deluge of pull requests to review. He 
> said if he's to spend due time on all of those, he'd be unable 
> to do any work of his own.

_I_ do most of the reviewing now, and this doesn't seem to have 
had any effect, see https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/9494 and 
related PRs.

> Those pull requests that have these things in common (note that 
> some may not apply to the pragma pull request, I'd just wrongly 
> put it in the same bin):
>
> * they are large
> * the improvement they bring needs arguing

When they are requisites for fixing bugs they don't, as was the 
case with most of the ones I'm pissed off about, and Jacob's 
recent ones are to make DMD as a library more useful...

> * their quality could be improved so they need careful review 
> and a couple of passes of changes

(Exactly which is not at all what has, and _still is_ being done.)
... In particular you are typically seeing a snapshot of a PR 
when you comment, and see only that change in isolation and miss 
the conversation in past PR discussion about where this is going. 
It is perfectly fine, in fact I encourage you, to inquire why 
this specific change is being made, we'll point you to the 
previous discussion.

What is _not_ fine is the drive-by style of review. This includes 
"Please don't let bureaucracy stand in the way of progress".

> A successful software system is a construction of Great Work on 
> a foundation of Right Work, with the inevitable Good Work here 
> and there.
>
> That's where we want to be.

The dlang ecosystem operates as an army of volunteers, you don't 
_get to choose_ the standard of work that comes in. It is was it 
is, and it will stay that way until such a time as it is not run 
by an army of volunteers. Yes, you can try to improve it (and so 
you should) but it needs to come off that that is your intention. 
Far too often, it comes off that you don't understand what or why 
the PR is doing what it is doing.