Dear reviewing IOTlers,
the RIOT maintainer meeting that happened yesterday triggered some thoughts
about our common workflow [1] when it comes to pull request introducing new
features, new hardware support, or new concepts.
The first observation is that proposing something new goes often along with
quite a bunch of implementation already done. On the one hand, this sometimes
steer discussions into the wrong direction where some people already start to
dig into implementation details while the discussion about the general
approach haven't yet concluded. On the other hand, the contributor is much
more reluctant to change his or her approach (or even give up on it) because
so much time has been spent for implementing it.
The second observation is that the typical scenario is that a single person
proposes a pull request and then tries to convince the rest of the community
that the idea and realization are good and worthwhile to be integrated into
RIOT master. Depending on the openness of this person regarding feedback and
his or her responsiveness the lifetime of the pull request and the effort
spent on it (from both sides) can easily explode.
As an idea how to tackle both problems, I think it could be useful to change
this "one against all" approach (over-exaggerating here, of course). If
someone wants to propose something new, he or she could ask for a somewhat
experienced RIOT developer to pair up with (we could think of it as a sparring
partner and sponsor if you like). So, one could first discuss the idea and the
realization approach with this partner, before actually starting the
implementation. Then, both (or potentially more people) would present the PR
to the rest of the community and try to defend and improved it together.
Cheers
Oleg
[1] Excuse me for still talking about "we" and "us" here although I haven't
contributed anything for a long time. And also excuse me if I'm not taking
recent developments in this respect into account.
--
panic("smp_callin() AAAAaaaaahhhh....\n");
linux-2.6.6/arch/parisc/kernel/smp.c
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