Hi Jim, Jim Waldo wrote:
So let me suggest that we start with a notion of trust, and adopt a CTR development process. More to the point, let's try to do something with the project, rather than continually debating how we are going to do anything...
From your posting I sense that you think reviewing before committing is essential as you say "I doubt seriously that I would ever commit anything to the project without having it reviewed, either by one of the other committers or by someone who I thought could understand the code (no matter how complex). I trust the other committers on the project to do the same.". In the end you even use the 'moral pointy finger' [1] I recognize from my parents ;-) You say start using CTR but with the expectation it has been reviewed before it appears for commit, so in fact you suggest RT-CTR. So that means a contributor must look for a reviewer, in my case this would likely resort into an open cry into the mailing list as I'm not in the luxury position I have qualified people around me that have time for that. So I would like to know the field experts (I know a few after all those years, but still have no oversight for the complete system) and therefore it would help me to have a list of people qualified to review per component. I therefore fail to see why not formalize this behavior, it is a clear signal to others the way we work (confusion is often a reason for frustration or as Bob pointed out disincentive to participate). For potential users (those who only download) who have read our policies it might even give a hunch about how much we care about code quality. With JIRA we can probably modify the process flow to assist in the RTC policy. As an aside, reviewing before committing is not that common for many of us. The way the Jini team worked probably scored very high in the Capability Maturity Model, but many potential committers (including me) have worked in environments where shooting from the hip is often the norm. And some can shoot very well from the hip, so if you are used to that and have been reasonable successful it can and will be confusing to be 'morally pointy fingered' by you while the official policy is CTR. As has been expressed by the mentors social skills are very important and I think it is harder to develop the right social skills for the River community if the expectations are different from the written policies. In my experience just lurking on a mailing list is not a very effective way to find out how one should behave as often you see many deviating behaviors and various tones and that is because between people that know each other fairly well adapted ways of communicating start to arise which might blur reality for others. It takes quite a while to be able to apply all the right filters. A good example of this is Gianugo who felt he was being confrontational against Bob, while in fact he was facing this http://www.gizmology.net/images/tank11.jpg, a lot of steel armor but inside a nice guy :-) Also I think there is plenty of time left to debate these things while AR1 is getting out the gate. I find it more frustrating that we can't properly finish these kind of discussion without resorting to "let's try to do something with the project, rather than continually debating how we are going to do anything...". If somebody finds something a non-discussion, just don't participate. In this case I think most initial vocal committers so far lean towards RTC, so I think we should explore a way that would make it workable without going against ASF policies. [1] probably there is a proper English saying for that, if so let me know that way I can use if more often and correctly :-) -- Mark
