Eric, Roland, et al I am a little hesitant to have (some sort of) a formal ranking system due to
(1) difficulty to keep it objective. It will inevitably require an arbiter, a someone whose opinion would be regarded as unbiased by the overwhelming majority of HttpClient regulars. To me, that would mean that such person should not be a committer or a contributor him/herself. Basically it would take Jeff "Jandalf" or someone of Jeff's calibre. I am not really sure Jeff would want to assume such a burden, and I simply can't think of anyone else not directly involved with HttpClient who could take such a role (2) difficulty to keep it up to date. Let us be realistic: we have difficulty to keep our changelog up to date, let alone such a delicate matter as a ranking system. (3) intention to keep HttpClient non-competitive. I do not think it is be a major revelation to say that most of us contribute to Apache Jakarta because we are willing to trade some of our free time and work for some recognition within the community of peers. Still, I do not want HttpClient to evolve (or degrade) into a racing competition of a sort. At the moment HttpClient is a delicate ecology that so far produced decent results. I really want to keep it that way. I think a simple extension to the existing changelog in a form of 'proposed by', 'inspired by', 'contributed by', 'verified by' 'helped by', 'tested by' clauses per major change/commit would be sufficient for the time being. Until the dust settles at the Jakarta PMC level Thoughts? Oleg -----Original Message----- From: Eric Johnson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2004 14:29 To: Commons HttpClient Project Subject: Re: @author tags Roland Weber wrote: >Hello Eric, > >I was thinking about some kind of metrics, too. >Not as advanced as yours, of course :-) But then >I felt that a ranking is not the best approach. It >may lure people to use tricks just to improve >their ranking. > Too true. My perspective on this matter is colored by the fact that everyone on this mailing list is very open and complimentary to each other, so I have a hard time seeing that happen here. I certainly don't want to do anything that would change that environment. As with any useful metric, it would require refinement over time, to prevent spoofing (I hope this isn't ever necessary), and to adjust for the relative value of contributions (size of patch, for example). The point of the recognition, I think, is to provide a compliment and encouragement to any and all that contribute, not necessarily to perfectly correlate with some abstract notion of the value of contributions. If anything, my suggestion was intended to be more inclusive than what we do now. So perhaps as a refinement, then, take something like the ranking I suggested earlier, compute the order and then divide into three groups - high, medium, and low involvement (or four, with the bottom fourth not actually recognized officially?). This would prevent people from "competing" to be first in the ranking, as people would just be recognized by which group they fell into. >There should be something that indicates the >kind and volume of contributions, sure. Like >"that many mails", "that many bug reports", and >so on. But instead of trying to compute a ranking >from it, I would prefer a randomized order, with >the kind and volume of contributions listed for >each person. Maybe with some "hall of fame" >into which the major contributors can be voted. > >Somehow I feel that the social issues should not >be tackled with a purely technical solution. > > After watching my spouse do grading of her student's papers, I think in the end there is always a necessary "fudge" factor involved in something that effectively looks like grading. That fudge factor that might push someone either up or down. For example, someone might come in late in a beta cycle with a key patch, and do so quickly, promptly, and correctly. Someone would have to invoke the judgement for an appropriate recategorization, perhaps the person doing the release? >cheers, > Roland > > -Eric. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *************************************************************************************************** The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended addressee is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, any review, disclosure, copying, distribution, retention, or any action taken or omitted to be taken in reliance on it is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please reply to or forward a copy of this message to the sender and delete the message, any attachments, and any copies thereof from your system. *************************************************************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
