On 9/25/2017 7:24 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
On 09/25/2017 07:56 AM, Chris Dent wrote:
On Fri, 22 Sep 2017, Paul Belanger wrote:
This is not a good example of encouraging anybody to contribute to the
project.
Yes. This entire thread was a bit disturbing to read. Yes, I totally
agree that mass patches that do very little are a big cost to
reviewer and CI time but a lot of the responses sound like: "go away
you people who don't understand our special culture and our
important work".
That's not a good look.
Matt's original comment is good in and of itself: I saw a thing,
let's remember to curtail this stuff and do it in a nice way.
But then we generate a long thread about it. It's odd to me that
these threads sometimes draw more people out then discussions about
actually improving the projects.
It's also odd that if OpenStack were small and differently
structured, any self-respecting maintainer would be happy to see
a few typo fixes and generic cleanups. Anything to push the quality
forward is nice. But because of the way we do review and because of
the way we do CI these things are seen as expensive distractions[1].
We're old and entrenched enough now that our tooling enforces our
culture and our culture enforces our tooling.
[1] Note that I'm not denying they are expensive distractions nor
that they need to be managed as such. They are, but a lot of that
is on us.
I was trying to ignore the thread in the hopes it would die out quick.
But torches and pitchforks all came out from the far corners, so I'm
going to push back on that a bit.
I'm not super clear why there is always so much outrage about these
patches. They are fixing real things. When I encounter them, I just
approve them to get them merged quickly and not backing up the review
queue, using more CI later if they need rebasing. They are fixing real
things. Maybe there is a CI cost, but the faster they are merged the
less likely someone else is to propose it in the future, which keeps
down the CI cost. And if we have a culture of just fixing typos later,
then we spend less CI time on patches the first time around with 2 or 3
iterations catching typos.
Thank you for saying what I failed to say in my most recent response. I
know some people don't care about typos, etc but they are things that
make us look like a lower quality community. It is stuff to fix and I
think we are wasting more resource in this discussion than just getting
the patches through.
I think the concern is the ascribed motive for why people are putting
these up. That's fine to feel that people are stat padding (and that too
many things are driven off metrics). But, honestly, that's only
important if we make it important. Contributor stats are always going to
be pretty much junk stats. They are counting things to be the same which
are wildly variable in meaning (number of patches, number of Lines of
Code).
My personal view is just merge things that fix things that are wrong,
don't care why people are doing it. If it gets someone a discounted
ticket somewhere, so be it. It's really not any skin off our back in the
process.
+2 I am going to assume the voice of reason has been heard and not
frustrate myself further with this thread.
If people are deeply concerned about CI resources, step one is to get
some better accounting into the existing system to see where resources
are currently spent, and how we could ensure that time is fairly spread
around to ensure maximum productivity by all developers.
-Sean
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