In article <9pieod$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Jeffrey W. Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Taken from Bug 103082: > > ------- Additional Comments From Brendan Eich 2001-10-04 12:50 ------- > > hyatt, perhaps we should take this to a newsgroup, but I still think > you're on dangerous ground by acting as high back-out sheriff. If > everyone did that for a 5% performance regression, I'd be happier. If > only you do it, you risk becoming bad-cop, and (what's more important) > others get to be victims. Even if you can manage to avoid being > capricious (what, you didn't back out the NSS changes that have slowed > down startup horrendously?! Why not?!!), you'll do a disservice to > others who need to back-out responsibly, too. > > I still don't see why this had to happen so fast that Gerv or sballard > couldn't do it. What am I missing? > > I like zero tolerance of performance regressions (as opposed to "zero > tolerance policies" misapplied in other domains, e.g., weapons bans > leading to frisks for nail clippers and expulsions for pointing one's > finger). I think the policy needs to be clearly articulated by > [EMAIL PROTECTED], and I strongly believe that individuals who > (wittingly or not) regress performance need to have a chance to make > good, if the regression is not so horrible that we can't live with it > for a day. I'd add that this can be extremely frustrating for people outside netscape. There are definitely two kinds of developers in the Mozilla project: those at netscape who can get r/sr/a in the space of 10 minutes, and those not a netscape whose work is scrutinized, criticized, complained about, put off, and finally backed out in the dead of night without so much as CCing the main author of the code. I mean very seriously, the main author was NOT CCed on bug 103082 during the 45 minutes needed by the IRC cabal to back out the link toolbar. Even if he was, I would expect that he might not have answered his email at 01:00 PST. The link toolbar, the fix to bug 2800, has undergone more revisions and reviews than most other features that have been committed to Mozilla. It underwent a relatively formal design process with a lengthy specification document. The developers put forth over a dozen working implementations and refinements thereof. This has been going on for most of the Mozilla Project's lifetime. Yet, the implementation was yanked without any coutesy to the developers when most reasonable people were asleep. Note well: a patch to fix the performance problems was available first ting in the morning. If hyatt hadn't been so hot to back it out, the perf problem would still have gotten fixed only a few hours later. I think if certain developers at netscape had to endure the same process that most outsiders do, they would appreciate more the value of common courtesy. After all, the link toolbar endured a gestation period 43000 times longer than the <tabbrowser> implementation, while both are UI changes of approximately equal magnitude. -jwb
