+1! I was also crafting a note about the fact that I would "ignore" patches that would make changes to code I don't fully understand. But Glyn said it better.
We are only doing our best. Sometimes this means that people, patches and issues get dropped on the floor. -- Tom Jordahl Macromedia -----Original Message----- From: Glyn Normington [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 11:22 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: too many "inactive" committers >Perhaps reviewing the submissions and -1'ing them would be better than >to keep silent. Otherwise, contributing has no sense, and people give up. >This is the fourth case that I'm aware of in axis-dev. People giving up *really* gets to me, especially as I must take partial responsibility. Not only is Axis the worse, but the people involved presumably go away feeling their contributions were unwanted, which is a great shame. I'd like to play my part in fixing this, but since Axis is the first open source project I've worked on, I'm still learning the ropes. What should I do when someone sends in a plausible patch in an area that's unfamiliar to me but the other commiters appear to ignore it? Should I vote +1 and if there are another two positive votes, take that as a mandate to commit the change? I guess the problem is I'm hesitant to change code that I don't personally understand well, so I tend to leave this to the experts in a particular area, even though they may be too busy. Do I need to have thoroughly understood any change I commit or is it reasonable to put some trust in the submitter of the change? On a slightly different tack, I was approached on two separate occasions with offers of help to implement the JAXM SOAP interfaces, but when I explained how to make a start, I heard nothing more. Perhaps newcomers worry about communicating openly on axis-dev? How can we cut through the mystique and let newcomers know that the rest of us are just ordinary programmers doing our best, understanding some things but not everything, and occasionally messing up and helping each other fix things up? For some reason, just saying this doesn't seem enough. Glyn
