Hi, thanks Larry.
Lars provided the Knox community with some feedback into our development > practices and JIRA usage [1]. > > I wanted to bring up a DISCUSS thread on how our CTR policy may or may not > relate to a couple points made in his feedback. In particular: > > 1. Whether a CTR based policy should require actual patches attached to > every JIRA or does the git link to a commit provide the same ability to > review post commit > I think having a patch attached before commit is a good thing because: * It allows feedback before a change goes in. In my experience that is easier to change than committed code * It allows looking at the exact change set in a standardised form (diff format) without having to use whatever web frontend (pure Git, Github, ...) is currently being used (so a patch file is useful even when only attached after committing)[1] * Should the Git web interface change (or be down) at some point in the future all those links might go stale (say Apache switches to Github or Gitlab or whatever) The downsides I can come up with is the extra work required to attach the patch (before or after commit). > 2. Whether a cool off period of 24 hrs would encourage more external > contributions and if so, how > This one is probably a matter of weighing off between fast iteration and possible feedback on patches. I assume with a project the size of Knox there is not much feedback coming in for each patch so the benefits of immediate commits probably outweigh the (assumed) benefits of waiting. My personal opinion though is that a wait period is a good thing. I've been bitten (and frustrated) in the past by reviews that have been ignored by certain communities/members/companies where it was clear that a release schedule had to be met. Ignoring reviews is easier with code that's already been committed. Again this is my personal (bad) experience and I have no reason to believe that the Knox community behaves the same. A cool off period doesn't mean that reviews are mandatory, it just invites/allows feedback in my opinion. One "real" benefit for pre-commit reviews is that there's tools available and in use at Apache for that (Reviewboard and JIRA to a degree) but there's currently no tooling support for post-commit reviews. Caveat to all of this: I'm only here for a few days a year probably and won't contribute much if at all so you should decide carefully whether you want to change working practices for an unknown benefit. Cheers, Lars [1] I know that the current web interface has an option to download the patch but it's a different process than most other "Hadoop related" projects.
