Generality creep

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2019 at 07:22:40PM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> 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. 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
> * their quality could be improved so they need careful review and a
> couple of passes of changes
> 
> This is what I call Good Work.
[...]
> Which brings us to Great Work.
[...]
> This brings us to Right Work.
[...]
> 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.

Had this been posted openly at the time, there might have been a lot
less frustration.  This is an area I feel desperately needs improvement.
This repeated lack of communication of this sort of thought process in
one form or another is what leads to repeated frustrations and
conflicts, because would-be contributors feel like information is being
withheld that would have enabled them to better understand what is
expected of them.  Even if these were just vague thoughts or a crude
outline of what you have in mind, and nowhere near something formal and
"presentable", providing partial information is better than no
information at all.


T

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.