----- Original Message ----- From: "Glyn Normington" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 8:21 AM 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? You can start a discussion on the subject and hope somebody who understands that area gets involved; they can look at it and say yes/no, leaving you to do the commit work. If you look at the Ant task guidelines, we have a checklist of things we like before committing, meaning docs and test cases are expected. We state that if you dont have these, the committer has to do them, so the probability of getting a commit in a reasonable time drops significantly http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ant_task_guidelines.html We also mention that reminding the mailing list regularly is something you have to do, and file the stuff as an open bug so that it doesnt get forgotten about. We still get lots of grief about 'you have ignored my patch', so always commenting on a submission is a good action. -steve
