If it is true what you say, what is the reason for this 
committer-only-assigns-JIRA tickets policy? If anyone can send a pull request, 
anyone should be able to assign tickets to himself/herself too.

+Vinod

On Apr 22, 2015, at 1:18 PM, Reynold Xin 
<r...@databricks.com<mailto:r...@databricks.com>> wrote:

Woh hold on a minute.

Spark has been among the projects that are the most welcoming to new 
contributors. And thanks to this, the sheer number of activities in Spark is 
much larger than other projects, and our workflow has to accommodate this fact.

In practice, people just create pull requests on github, which is a newer & 
friendlier & better model given the constraints. We even have tools that 
automatically tags a ticket with a link to the pull requests.


On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Vinod Kumar Vavilapalli 
<vino...@hortonworks.com<mailto:vino...@hortonworks.com>> wrote:
Actually what this community got away with is pretty much an anti-pattern 
compared to every other Apache project I have seen. And may I say in a not so 
Apache way.

Waiting for a committer to assign a patch to someone leaves it as a privilege 
to a committer. Not alluding to anything fishy in practice, but this also 
leaves a lot of open ground for self-interest. Committers defining notions of 
good fit / level of experience do not work, highly subjective and lead to group 
control.

In terms of semantics, here is what most other projects (dare I say every 
Apache project?) that I have seen do
 - A new contributor comes in who is not yet added to the JIRA project. He/she 
requests one of the project's JIRA admins to add him/her.
 - After that, he or she is free to assign tickets to themselves.
 - What this means
    -- Assigning a ticket to oneself is a signal to the rest of the community 
that he/she is actively working on the said patch.
    -- If multiple contributors want to work on the same patch, it needs to 
resolved amicably through open communication. On JIRA, or on mailing lists. Not 
by the whim of a committer.
 - Common issues
    -- Land grabbing: Other contributors can nudge him/her in case of 
inactivity and take them over. Again, amicably instead of a committer making 
subjective decisions.
    -- Progress stalling: One contributor assigns the ticket to himself/herself 
is actively debating but with no real code/docs contribution or with any real 
intention of making progress. Here workable, reviewable code for review usually 
wins.

Assigning patches is not a privilege. Contributors at Apache are a bunch of 
volunteers, the PMC should let volunteers contribute as they see fit. We do not 
assign work at Apache.

+Vinod

On Apr 22, 2015, at 12:32 PM, Patrick Wendell 
<pwend...@gmail.com<mailto:pwend...@gmail.com>> wrote:

> One over arching issue is that it's pretty unclear what "Assigned to
> X" in JIAR means from a process perspective. Personally I actually
> feel it's better for this to be more historical - i.e. who ended up
> submitting a patch for this feature that was merged - rather than
> creating an exclusive reservation for a particular user to work on
> something.
>
> If an issue is "assigned" to person X, but some other person Y submits
> a great patch for it, I think we have some obligation to Spark users
> and to the community to merge the better patch. So the idea of
> reserving the right to add a feature, it just seems overall off to me.
> IMO, its fine if multiple people want to submit competing patches for
> something, provided everyone comments on JIRA saying they are
> intending to submit a patch, and everyone understands there is
> duplicate effort. So commenting with an intention to submit a patch,
> IMO seems like the healthiest workflow since it is non exclusive.
>
> To me the main benefit of "assigning" something ahead of time is if
> you have a committer that really wants to see someone specific work on
> a patch, it just acts as a strong signal that there is someone
> endorsed to work on that patch. That doesn't mean no one else can
> submit a patch, but it is IMO more of a warning that there may be
> existing work which is likely to be high quality, to avoid duplicated
> effort.
>
> When it was really easy to assign features to themselves, I saw a lot
> of anti-patterns in the community that seemed unhealthy, specifically:
>
> - It was really unclear what it means semantically if someone is
> assigned to a JIRA.
> - People assign JIRA's to themselves that aren't a good fit, given the
> authors level of experience.
> - People expect if they assign JIRA's to themselves that others won't
> submit patches, and become upset if they do.
> - People are discouraged from working on a patch because someone else
> was officially assigned.
>
> - Patrick
>
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 11:13 AM, Sean Owen 
> <so...@cloudera.com<mailto:so...@cloudera.com>> wrote:
>> Anecdotally, there are a number of people asking to set the Assignee
>> field. This is currently restricted to Committers in JIRA. I know the
>> logic was to prevent people from Assigning a JIRA and then leaving it;
>> it also matters a bit for questions of "credit".
>>
>> Still I wonder if it's best to just let people go ahead and set it, as
>> the lesser "evil". People can already do a lot like resolve JIRAs and
>> set shepherd and critical priority and all that.
>>
>> I think the intent was to let "Developers" set this, but maybe due to
>> an error, that's not how the current JIRA permission is implemented.
>>
>> I ask because I'm about to ping INFRA to update our scheme.
>>
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