My apologies for mixing the FB discussion and the commitership issue, which are indeed separate.
Of course, I have never said FB is a magic wand, etc., and indeed no such tool is. One makes use of these tools as helpers, and not as determiners. Is the trouble of using FB regularly worth it? I suppose it depends on one's perspective. I find it extremely easy to use and easy to check the results. It serves as merely one more filter on the build and dev process, and does appear to be able to identify real bugs on occasion. Yes, there is occasionally some chaff to deal with. Then again, and perhaps to stretch an analogy, I recall working on the SDI (strategic defense initiative) in the 80s, and observed an extraordinary amount of effort and money spent to distinguish the decoy warheads from the real warheads. Few were willing to argue that because there were 10 - 100 decoys for every real one, then it wasn't worth the trouble to separate them. Are the "decoy" bugs (false positives) too much to bother with even if FB finds a few real ones? Personally, I think so. Now, regarding commitership, I must say that if I were already a committer, I would probably have already fixed all the current FB exclusions or documented the chaff as acceptable. However, having to go through other committers to fix up all these issues is simply too much pain, partly because it places more delays into the process and makes it harder to implement such fixes in the face of a moving target. Having spent at least 8 months contributing to FOP, I find it disconcerting that (1) I am still waiting feedback about committer status, (2) I have not even been acknowledged as a contributor (see http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/team.html). Frankly, the process appears to be broken. G. On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 3:25 PM, Andreas Delmelle < andreas.delme...@telenet.be> wrote: > <snip /> > > Just to be clear: my main issue was with maintaining the auto-exclusion > policy in the longer term. I do not question the past decisions, nor did I > intend to point fingers (even if only implicitly). If I enervated anyone by > bringing this up again, my apologies. > The more general context is avoiding what Glenn referred to as > 'stagnation'. > > I was just concerned about the most current action, because I can see where > Glenn and Vincent are coming from. I noticed the FB target had been added, > and was sincerely interested in using it, but if this is how its use will be > promoted, that interest might very well fade quite soon... > > I do not see FB as a magic wand myself, as there are obviously a lot of > common and less common, in-your-face mistakes, anti-patterns or other types > of ugliness that do not raise any flag whatsoever, not even a warning, but > do deserve attention nevertheless. Things that require a human eye and brain > to detect them. > I see it more as a learning experience, hoping that in time, one's code > style will adapt and those dubious patterns are avoided to begin with, hence > reducing the 'additional effort' required to the time necessary to run the > build target and check whether the result is still zero... > It might just make you an even better coder in the long term. Or, maybe you > think that is just not possible... ;-) > > Speaking in a more general context, no matter how many layers of testing > and automated checks are added, it is always possible to produce the > proverbial substandard spaghetti. No guarantees there, unfortunately. > It *will* be reasonably guarded against future regressions and be virtually > free of functional bugs, though... and have a fairly consistent style, too! > :-> > > About the whole committership debate: > I feel like I should remind people that some --including myself-- got voted > in without having submitted a single line of code. It's all about > contributions, in whatever form. > There have also been people that donated very significant patches, but > never stayed long enough to be considered. > Come to think of it, I almost cannot remember when the previous committer > got voted in. Was that Pascal? Quite some time ago, and I am seeing patches > in Bugzilla that reveal a few potentials. Just a suggestion. Contact me > off-list if you do not see them immediately. No name-dropping here. ;-) > They might be tempted to spend their time elsewhere if their efforts here > are not 'rewarded' in some way other than just: 'Thanks for the patch!' > > > Regards, > > Andreas > ---
