Susan L. Cline wrote: > Hello Derby-dev, > > I'm writing to point out an experience which discouraged me about growing our > community with new > contributors. > > Recently I submitted a patch for a JUnit test. I have contributed very few > patches in the form > of code to Derby (I've had just a couple for the Eclipse plug-ins.) I am not > a Java developer by > trade or training, but I have contributed to the Derby community by writing > articles, sample applications and some wiki entries. > > My JUnit contribution received comments by two different folks. I believe > that some of the > comments were valid and helpful to me to improve my programming skills and > also to help insure > that the test I wrote was readable and understandable, as well as to fit into > the constraints that > JUnit imposes as well as the Derby test harness. > > However, I feel that some of the comments were more style-related or were > nits that the individual > reviewer had. This is where I feel discouraged.
As one of the reviewers I'm sorry you felt discouraged, that was never my intention and I'm sure it wasn't Kristian's (as the other reviewer). Looking back at the set of comments I can see comments about various style issues, but to my reading none of them seem to say "you must do it my way", in fact they include phrases like "Maybe a style issue, but I prefer not to have constants like", and "2 and 3 are nits, use your own judgement. ". I personally could use help to know exactly what discouraged you, so that any review comments in the future would not discourage contributors. > One of the biggest goals I think we have is to > embrace contributors (and therefore their contributions) and to guide them > where it is necessary, but also to accept contributions that represent > "incremental work." Also, > I think when someone makes a contribution it has something to do with that > individuals "itch". In > this case I thought it would be fun to learn JUnit and become more familiar > with the > Derby test harness, and that was my itch. > > I am fortunate in that I am paid to work on Derby, but I think of other > individuals who are not > paid to work on Derby. If they make a contribution which is not accepted, > partially due to style > issues, how likely are we to get new contributors? Again, I'm not saying > that I wrote the > perfect test and others are not welcome to comment on my code, but on the > other hand if we make > the barrier to contribute (and it was just a test!) this high, how likely are > we to get > contributions from individuals who have a lesser stake in Derby than their > own livelihood? I agree it would be very bad if the Derby community did not accept patches that practiced incremental development, or based upon style issues. I don't think that has ever happened. I guess I'm a little confused by your last two paragraphs, the community should "guide them" in the first paragraph, which is what I thought the review comments were, but in the second paragraph it seems you view the same review comments as a barrier. Since Apache is a peer based community, maybe it should be made clearer that reviewers' comments are just "their comments", the contributor doesn't have to follow all, or even any, of the advice. Any committer can commit any patch that they "have a high degree of confidence in". In my opinion a committer may gain confidence in a patch by requesting certain changes in it through review comments. If those changes don't happen or partially happen, then committer can re-evaluate their confidence level in the patch, possibly leading to committing the patch. If the committer decides not to commit the patch, then it's possible they may modify it to have confidence in it and then submit it, though this might occur much later when the committer (or anyone else) has time. Thanks, Dan.
