On Aug 31, 2021, at 11:50, Rich Bowen <rbo...@rcbowen.com> wrote:
On 8/31/21 12:24 PM, sebb wrote:
That seems to me to be an overreaction.
Yes, I can see that it would seem that way without a larger context. The number
of messages I have received on various lists, and off-list, calling this effort
wrong/bad/evil, have been ... demoralizing, shall we say?
In my case, I have no complaints about the purpose of the analysis.
It's the excessing false positives and UI of the software that is the
problem, combined with a poorly worded email.
I appreciate that you have no complaints about the purpose of the analysis.
Others do, and have made those complaints both very obvious and very personal.
While this is often the case with this conversation, the vitriol this time has
been somewhat disturbing. And that's from someone who has had this conversation
with probably 200 projects over the past 18 months.
I think what needs to happen is for a detailed investigation of the
results, especially for projects that have lots of hits, so that the
scanning can be properly tuned.
It's pretty obvious at present that the scanning is far too eager to
report issues (and not just master in URLs).
I disagree. I think that highlighting all potential problematic words/phrases
is part of the message, whether or not the project in question feels the need
to address all of them. The purpose here is to make people aware of how the
words/phrases in their code and documentation affect other people.
There also needs to be some work on the UI, to make it easier to
ignore individual files, and to make it easier to actually edit the
source files.
It is not the goal of the tool to make editing source files easy or even
possible. It's a code analysis tool. Sure, it could link to the file in the
target repository, which may be what you're asking for. But it's not intended
to be a remediation tool.
There are some other issue no doubt.
Once the reports are usable without lots of effort by projects, then
maybe start inviting a few random projects to see if they have any
feedback on the analysis.
Fix any issues, and gradually increase the number of projects.
It might be an idea to send a follow-up email to explain why all the
projects have been removed.
One of the things we were reprimanded for was sending a cross-project email
about this topic in the first place. As such, I won't be advocating sending a
followup email on the same topic. Someone else is, of course, welcome to pursue
that avenue.
Though I think it would have been better to keep the projects (apart
from retired ones), but send an email to say that the analyses are
currently at the alpha stage, and solicit feedback on improving the
scanning.
They're *not* at an alpha stage. Those words *do* appear in the code. And I'm
already using this same tool elsewhere, as part of my day job. It's a tool. It
wasn't the tool that people objected to. It was the analysis.
That way might result in analyses that projects actually want.
My take-away was that the projects *don't* want this analysis.
--
Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com
@rbowen
