Le 25/05/2020 à 22:34, Thomas Monjalon a écrit :
25/05/2020 20:44, Morten Brørup:
From: Thomas Monjalon
25/05/2020 18:09, Burakov, Anatoly:
obviously, but i have a suspicion that we'll get more of it if we
lower
the barrier for entry (not the barrier for merge!). I think there is
a
way to lower the secondary skill level needed to contribute to DPDK
without lowering coding/merge standards with it.
That is exactly what I am asking for: Lowering the barrier and increasing the
feeling of success for newcomers. (The barrier for merge is probably fine; I'll
leave that discussion to the maintainers.)
I understand.
About the barrier for entry, maybe it is not obvious because I don't
communicate a lot about it, but please be aware that I (and other
maintainers I think) are doing a lot of changes in newcomer patches
to avoid asking them knowing the whole process from the beginning.
Then frequent contributors get educated on the way.
Great! I wish that every developer would think and behave this way.
I think the only real barrier we have is to sign the patch
with a real name and send an email to right list.
The ask for SoB real name is probably what started this thread
in Morten's mind. And the SoB requirement will *never* change.
The incorrect Signed-off-by might be the only hard barrier (which we cannot
avoid). But that did not trigger me.
I was raising the discussion to bring attention to soft barriers for
contributors. What triggered me was the request to split the patch into
multiple patches; a kind of feedback I have seen before. For an experienced git
user, this is probably very easy, but for a git newbie (like myself), it
basically means starting all over and trying to figure out the right set of git
commands to do this, which can be perceived as a difficult task requiring a lot
of effort.
Yes I am aware about this difficulty.
It is basically knowing git-reset and git-add -p.
I agree a cookbook for this kind of thing is required.
I would like to do the split for newcomers,
but we need also to validate the explanations of each commit.
A solution in such case is to send the split so the newbie can just
fill what is missing.
This kind of workflow is really what we should look at improving.
Perhaps we could supplement the Contributor Guidelines with a set of cookbooks
for different steps in the contribution process, so reviewers can be refer
newcomers to the relevant of these as part of the feedback. Just like any
professional customer support team has a set of canned answers ready for common
customer issues. (Please note: I am not suggesting adding an AI/ML chat bot
reviewer to the mailing list!)
OK
The amount of Contributor Guideline documentation is also a balance... it must
be long enough to contain the relevant information to get going, but short
enough for newcomers to bother reading it.
Yes, we need short intros and long explanations when really needed.
It is touching another issue: we lack some documentation love.
Maybe we could find something that allows to "git push" to the
patchwork, where it kind of appears already as a github-like discussion?
It doesn't miss a lot to enable writing from the website directly
(basically auto-email).
Personnaly I've put a lot of efforts to fix simple comments, be sure
that I wrote "v2" here, sign-off there, cc-ed the right person, not mess
my the format-patch versions, changed only the cover letter, ... Quite
afraid of bothering that big mailing list for nothing.
I'm infrequent enough to have te re-learn every time basically. It would
be much easier with a git push, a fast online review of the diff, as on
github/gitlab, and done. Also, those allow online edits, and therefore
allows "elders" to do small fixes directly in the "patch". Some fixes
are not worth the discussion and the chain of mails. That's what I'm
missing the most personnaly.
Tom
