(Thanks for the apology Brandon. For those confused, he was responding to a private email I sent him that said: "I feel like you read my email until you found something to nitpick, and then ignored the rest of it.")
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Brandon Bloom <snprbo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > contributions to clojure are definitely less easy to make than to > projects > > that willy-nilly accept any pull request. > > False dichotomy. Accepting pull requests does not mean you need to be > willy-nilly about it. > > You know how people carefully optimize their signup forms and checkout > flows? They do this because there's a (very large) category of people who > simply give up when things aren't immediately obvious. Granted, this > category is much smaller among the class of folks skilled enough to create > a desirable Clojure patch. However, the fact that this topic keeps coming > up suggests that maybe that group is large enough to pay attention too. > > This is only a valid comparison if the goal for Clojure was "gather as many contributors as possible." If the goal is minimize maintainer effort, or maximize maintainer pleasure, or maximize maintainer/submitter pleasure, then the results are less comparable. Are we at the right point on the axis? Maybe not, but Clojure has managed to collect quite a few contributions over its life, so all I know is that we at least are not at a complete minima. > As the Clojure implementations evolve, fewer and fewer people will > discover issues large enough to justify diving into the code base to fix > them. Most people just work around the issues. If somebody takes the > initiative to properly fix an issue, we shouldn't add yet another hurdle > discouraging them from contributing. > I don't believe this is truly a likely scenario. In my experience there are always minor bugs to be fixed. However, I do think there is some sort of function that could be graphed of "patch size/complexity vs maintainer effort". The problem is that as patch complexity drops to zero, maintainer effort does NOT, it drops to some minimum. (Also, as patch size grows linearly, I would guess that maintainer effort grows at some exponential). So, a contribution that is truly valuable in terms of saving a maintainer effort actually has a fairly narrow window of complexity. This by the way, is why getting Rich's buy in before you start coding is valuable. (I sympathize with your dislike of JIRA by the way) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
