On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:24:37PM -0500, David Robinson wrote: > So the new third category are people willing to do all the > grunt work of builds and tests that consumes all the time. > This is the same thing we expect out of any Solaris > developer so potentially the pool is anyone who has > successfully done just one putback. > > Then the sponsor plays more of the role that is more traditionally > done by a CRT advocate, verifying they did everything > necessary, repeat until satisfied. > > If I have this right, this seems very reasonable.
Since it seems to have been lost, I'll repeat my comment from Friday: > Dan Price said: > > I don't agree with this structure, then. I think that at a minimum, > > one should be considered a trained, qualified, and active contributor to > > the release in question. > > I agree (with Dan). This plan seems focused on the gate and to a > lesser extent the tier-3 engineer, and pays little attention to the > needs of the original contributor. If someone is "unable or > unwilling to mentor" someone internally, I don't see how or why they > should take on a role where they're effectively mentoring someone > outside of Sun -- someone who has no exposure to how Sun works > internally and is 100% dependent on their sponsor for guidance. > > As a means of growing the experience of our more junior employees, it > seems like a pretty poor diet. There is more to becoming a good > engineer than learning the process surrounding putback, and there's a > huge difference between shepherding pre-made fixes and generating > your own. I think the overhead spent on a tier-3 engineer would be > better spent getting them to the tier-2 position based on their own > work -- better for both the engineers and the contributors. My point is that whatever process we put in place needs to do a lot more than just ensure that what gets put back works. The proposed structure does only that. Regardless of whether they have a "tier-2" or "tier-1" partner, a sponsor is the primary source of information for an external contributor. It is difficult to unlearn bad habits, and someone who doesn't qualify as a "tier-2" sponsor doesn't sound like they would have -- much less be able to teach -- the good habits a new contributor needs to learn. I don't think putting inexperienced people on the front line is fair to the contributor, and I don't think its good for OpenSolaris in the long term. To look at this from another perspective, an engineer meeting only the minimum requirements for "tier-3" probably knows less about putting back than our more prolific external contributors. Dave
