On 11 December 2014 at 12:10, Christoph Hormann <[email protected]> wrote: > I am somewhat reluctant to bring up this problem since i think the more > active development is a good thing in total and i don't want to > badmouth this.
I'm glad that you bring this up, please don't be reluctant! I know that the development process for openstreetmap-carto could do with some improvements. First subject: The merging of changes. My normal process it to go to the list of pull requests assigned to me, and then work down them from the top down, i.e. dealing with the newest things first. https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pulls/assigned/gravitystorm I first try to merge anything that's complicated, like a refactoring. Small changes like changing zoom levels of an icon are easier to redo later on if there are merge conflicts. Secondly I merge any small 'no brainers' like fixing text-dy. There's no need for them to wait. Then I do other things, starting with stuff where I'm happy with the fix and they can be merged with no conflicts. Then I start working through any of the above that now needs manual conflict resolution. Then I revisit things that I've passed over - things that take more thought, or where I'm considering rejecting the pull requests or asking for modifications. It seems elaborate perhaps, but it's basically just me trying to get as many things merged in the limited time that I have available. From that it would be a reasonable conclusion to think that I'm being a bottleneck on the development - well, perhaps I am. But what is frustrating me most is that I end up spending all my time working on pull requests that I simply don't think are the most important tasks, but there are so many of them (and so many calls for me to hurry up with the reviews) that I never actually work on anything else. The time I'm not spending reviewing and merging PRs I'm instead spending wading through all the comments on issues, which are still running at over 100 a week. But these are just implementation details. The bigger problem is that after 2 years of work we're not making much progress on the most important things. The style we have now is pretty much the same as it was two years ago. We've made hundreds of changes and I'm a fan of iterative development, but I'm not sure that we're iterating in any particular direction. I'd love to "sort out" the mishmash of colours, but I'm disheartened by how long it is taking us to sort out just the buildings, and solving the 'trunk roads in forests' and the hundred other problems like this seems a long way off. Even when we're changing small things we get bogged down in endless debates and scrutiny, and unfortunately all the debating doesn't actually lead to significantly better results. I don't like reviewing the pull requests. It's not fun. Almost every one I merge I think that I'd have done something slightly differently - an extra zoom here, a different colour there, a changed icon etc. I've deliberately tried not to bikeshed every single pull request and so ended up merging a lot of stuff that's not quite to my taste or changes that aren't entirely cohesive. Am I getting this wrong? Should I be delaying more PRs until I get time to tweak them? Or should I stop reviewing the PRs entirely and just merge any of them that don't cause syntax errors? One thing that I'm still sure of is that we need a *team* of cartographers. There are too many things in the map, and too many ideas and discussions for the style for it to be run by just one person. And the work that we're doing now is 10 times more than I could do without the help of everyone who is working on it. But I don't know how best to organize ourselves. And I'm still unsure if it's possible to have a consistent, coherent, nice and yet detailed map with dozens of people making iterative changes. I hope it is! So I pose a question that's most pressing on my mind - should the other maintainers be merging PRs without me reviewing them first? Will this lead to a better result? If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears. Thanks, Andy _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
