Hi, Albert ARIBAUD wrote: > > > This doesn't sound very encouraging for the project in general. :-( > > > > It's essentially the contributor's task to make it effortless for > > maintainers to accept contributions. > > Maybe not effortless but as easy as reasonable, certainly.
Yes effortless. Remember that maintainer time is a limited resource. > Here, IIUC, the main factor is the time needed to analyze the patch(es). Right, good review always takes time, but when a patch is less than ideal then review requires a lot *more* time from the maintainer - the limited resource. This is unacceptable, not because maintainers hate non-ideal contributions, but because it is impossible for maintainers to spend so much time on overhead. > OTOH, it should not be burdensome to contribute. I think that's a little bit too naive. When someone wants to contribute something and do it well they have to accept quite a lot of responsibility if they want to maximize the chances of their contribution being included into the project. Over the years I've seen countless developers who can do this pretty effortlessly, and I've also seen many developers who can not get a simple patch into acceptable form even after ten rounds of feedback. Since maintainers are not able to go back and forth with contributors ad infinitum the responsibility and yes burden for contribution really lies with the contributor. I agree with you that projects should not raise unneccessary barriers for contributions, here some projects are better, some worse. > Ok, that's anecdotal, but still: I've tried to register to the OpenOCD > Gerrit, and gave up for now because it wants me to register through a > GitHub, Google, Launchpad, or Yahoo! account, or through Open ID, and > did not leave me any visible option to just register with the e-mail > and password of my choice. *That*, for instance, is a burden, as these > accounts are not related to, an not needed for, contributing to OpenOCD. Gerrit is used by many different projects, it is a very valuable tool and contributors only need a single OpenID in order to contribute to all of those projects. I'm happy to create an OpenID account on my OpenID server for you if you want, please email me off-list in that case. > IMO, the amount of unrelated-to-OpenOCD effort that a contributor needs > to endure in order to submit a patch should be limited to providing a > verified e-mail address to Gerrit. Gerrit does not support that mode of operation. Feel free to send patches to the Gerrit project to extend it, so that it does. But please think hard about how Gerrit has outsourced the entire authentication problem by relying on OpenID before you write something up. Please also write contribute such a patch to Gerrit only with strong operational experience from "verified email" schemes, so that your patch already tackles the important problems involved. > > That can be really difficult if contributions touch on complex issues. > > Since the main issue seems to be a lack of "maintainer time", Maybe I should have written "issues in the code" to be more clear. > maybe a solution could be topic-specific branches (or possibly repos), .. > not having registered on the OpenOCD Gerrit yet .. > I have no idea .. > if there are topic branches in Gerrit already that just don't show > up in a git clone Gerrit does support branches, and in Gerrit you can even think of every single pushed commit as a branch. The fact that anyone can maintain their own branch in the OpenOCD Gerrit is one of its advantages. //Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ OpenOCD-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openocd-devel
