On Sunday, 11 June 2017 at 00:22:50 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
On Sunday, 11 June 2017 at 00:06:13 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Dev resources are stretched thin as it is, I doubt the core
team would go for it.
I think dev resources are thin because of mismanagement by the
core team failing to attract and retain contributors. Part of
this mismanagement is a really discouraging attitude toward
positive yet breaking change; I propose that mere willingness
to shake up the status quo would help to solve the resource
shortage.
Building on that: 82% of patches for Mozilla Firefox are accepted
at first sight. Analysis of the reviews shows that the developper
himself often comes back to his patch to correct it before
resubmitting it. Such corrections often are due to style because
style isn't generally blocking. That said, having worked on
Firefox's codebase a fair amount of time I must say that they
have one of the cleanest C++ codebase I've ever seen.
The whitepaper is here [1], named "The influence of non-technical
factors on code review". I strongly recommend reading it,
especially for you Walter and Andrei as I think you might like
some of its insights.
There again we are not Mozilla, Phobos is a standard library, a
compiler doesn't release every 3 months. But one thing is sure,
if Firefox can accept 82% of patches at first sight, if 60% of
all patches end up being integrated without resubmission, then
the projet size isn't an issue. And before such evidence I am
definitely not convinced that it should be hard to introduce a
change. What should be hard is introducing a bad one.
(Then again I'm all talk and not wanting to take care of the
matter myself so I'm not expecting anything to change just from
this post.)
[1]: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~rtholmes/papers/wcre_2013_baysal.pdf
