[dmd-internals] DVCS and patches feedback [was: dmd commit, revision 515]

[Leandro Lucarella]

Brad Roberts, el  3 de junio a las 21:45 me escribiste:
> On 6/3/2010 3:39 PM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Walter Bright, el  3 de junio a las 14:16 me escribiste:
> >>
> >> A couple more things need to happen:
> >>
> >> 4. have to fold it into D1, or if it's a D1 patch, fold it into D2
> >> 5. update change logs, bugzilla resolution messages
> > 
> > And that is (or should be) part of making the patch too, not merging it.
> > If patches are not good or complete enough, you should give people
> > feedback and tell them what to change to make a quality and complete
> > patch, not fix the patch for them. If you do that, people will not learn
> > and you will work much more than you should, as it happened when the
> > back-end source was not available. I hope sometime in the future you can
> > see that.
> > 
> 
> You want the barrier to entry for patch creation to be as low as
> possible.  Every hoop you make people jump through the less likely
> they are to bother doing anything.  Feedback is certainly good, and
> might increase the quality of the submissions.  I'll take an
> incomplete fix over no fix though.

Of course, but feedback is the key. I'm not saying to be a jerk and tell
people "your patch is not good enough, next!" like the soup nazi. I'm
talking about *encouraging* people to make good patches. People is often
more willing to do it if they have good advice that you might think.

Please, don't focus in the possible "negative" side of what I say. I'm
not suggesting to be unreasonable.

> As a specific version of that, if I had to fix D1 as well, I'd likely
> stop producing fixes.  My interest lies in D2 alone.  It's easy to
> argue that a fix for d2 is worth having without the corresponding d1
> fix.

That's another issue. Porting a patch to another branch is another type
of work. And it makes sense that that is done by the branch maintainer
(that, unfortunately, now Walter is for both branches; I think it would
be good to have a maintainer for D1 so Walter can focus on D2).

> You want the work Walter has to do to be as low as possible.  The more
> someone else does the less he does and the higher the overall
> throughput.  There's obvious goodness here.

I don't understand what you mean.

> Those are conflicting goals.  There's no perfect solution, but there's
> always room for improvement, so it's all good.

:)

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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