Contradictory justification for status quo

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 05:57:53PM -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 2/26/15 5:48 PM, Zach the Mystic wrote:
> >I sometimes feel so bad for Kenji, who has come up with several
> >reasonable solutions for longstanding problems, *and* implemented
> >them, only to have them be frozen for *years* by indecision at the
> >top.
> 
> Yah, we need to be quicker with making decisions, even negative. This
> requires collaboration from both sides - people shouldn't get furious
> if their proposal is rejected. Kenji has been incredibly gracious
> about this.
[...]

I don't think people would be furious if they knew from the beginning
that something would be rejected. At least, most reasonable people
won't, and I'm assuming that the set of unreasonable people who
contribute major features is rather small (i.e., near cardinality 0).

What *does* make people furious / disillusioned is when they are led to
believe that their work would be accepted, and then after they put in
all the effort to implement it, make it mergeable, keep it up to date
with the moving target of git HEAD, etc., it then gets summarily
dismissed.  Or ignored for months and years, and then suddenly shot
down. Or worse, get *merged*, only to be reverted later because the
people who didn't bother giving feedback earlier now show up and decide
that they don't like the idea after all.  (It's a different story if
post-merge rejection happened because it failed in practice -- I think
reasonable people would accept that.  But post-merge rejection because
of earlier indecision / silence kills morale really quickly. Don't
expect to attract major contributors if morale is low.)


T

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