Painful ? It's actually quite refreshing after a hard work day. Enjoyable. Regards, Stephane
PS : I'd be very interesting to talk about general accessibility/ergonomics too. On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Paul Boddie <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wednesday 18. September 2013 15.23.56 David Deutsch wrote: > > > > Credibility? Eternalize? What? Look - I'm just a FOSS coder and I don't > > care how "professional" or whatever I come across. What I do care about > is > > an /honest/ track record that can be seen in my github profile, amongst > > other things. I would like to help out in other projects as well, > > eventually, and I want to be able to offer an honest, cohesive picture of > > how past efforts went about. That's why I showed you what I did for > RedBean > > - to give you a direct view into how it went down in another example. If > I > > propose help to other projects, I don't think they would care much about > > how "professional" I am, but they would very much appreciate an honest > > picture of the process. > > I'm mostly lurking on this list at the moment, having made an enquiry a few > months ago about something that I've not been able to prioritise (more > below), > but this thread is too painful to read without commenting. > > In principle I also am against the excessive rebase culture that a lot of > Free > Software projects employ. The joke about this culture is that in its most > extreme form one wouldn't bother having more than a single commit in a > repository, and that commit would be accompanied by a message reading > "Perfection!", "All done!", "Project complete!" or "Nailed it!" > > That you also see projects *making* version control software insisting on > rebasing or collapsing changesets, even though rebasing may be frowned upon > and collapsing changesets may involve advanced functionality, could be > considered akin to hypocrisy: people making tools to manage the > information in > software development insisting that such information be thrown away. > (Please > note that I'm not saying anything about Roundcube's commit or contributions > policy here.) > > However, one should respect that projects do have commit policies for good > reasons. Some of these policies are infuriatingly strict: the Mercurial > project, for example, generally wants a single commit for enhancements, bug > fixes and new features (even though no-one in their right mind would do the > work in a single commit "for real"), and the commit message must adhere to > a > specific format; all of this is on top of other policies one may or may not > like (line lengths, discouragement of comments, obligatory tests, > discouragement of new tests, obligatory documentation, and so on). It can > take > several iterations to get something that the core developers will accept. > > On the one hand, it can seem like people are just making life hard for > casual > contributors. I am aware of one project controlled by a large corporation > who > apparently makes contributing very much like a "ring of fire" experience > perhaps even more extreme than what I have described above. When people who > are paid to work on a project make more work for volunteers, one can > legitimately question their motives. > > On the other hand, it is understandable that core developers do not wish to > readily take on more work that other people have thrown over the wall, > giving > those core developers code to maintain forever while the contributors enjoy > the benefits of their work in the resulting product, with the contributed > code > magically bug-fixed and updated for any and all of the architectural > changes > and transformations that might come about. > > As others have pointed out, your work will always be available in the form > in > which you made it available if you continue to publish your > repositories/branches. Those who you wish to convince about the substance > of > your work will still be able to see it and appreciate your efforts. But you > should also appreciate that those who have to maintain your contributions > should also get to choose how they can work with those contributions. > Denying > those people any choice sends a signal that may be interpreted negatively > by > others, regardless of whether words like "professional" are in their > vocabulary. > > I think it is great to see your enthusiasm to improve Roundcube, and being > much more of a Python developer than someone who uses PHP, your work > appears > to be beneficial to people like me. Please don't squander this opportunity > to > see good work done by attaching a price to your contributions that may end > up > with only you bearing the cost. > > Paul > > P.S. My original business on this list was to inquire about accessibility > support in Roundcube. If anyone has any thoughts on the topic (whether > Roundcube is perceived to be sufficient/deficient, whether work could be > done), I'd be happy to revive that thread. > _______________________________________________ > Roundcube Development discussion mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.roundcube.net/mailman/listinfo/dev >
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