Instead of discouraging contributions, the project should ease the contribution - and also the review process. The current JIRA + Reviewboard infrastructure needs a lot's of unnecessary manual steps, which hurts everyone who wants to help. Currently, the contributor needs to do the following, after they have a working commit in their git repository 1, open a jira ticket 2, generate a patch from git 2, create a review boad request, uploading the patch to it 3, upload the patch to jira 4, if something is not correct, they have to repeat 2-3.
Similarly, for the reviewer, he has to manually download, apply, and run the tests locally, even when he thinks the patch is ok. My suggestion is to switch to a pull request based workflow, where the manual patch creation, upload-download process could be omitted, and travis or some other automatic build service should be introduced, to ensure, that the base sanity tests are not omitted accidentally. With this process, a commiter could review and approve a trivial commits in less than a minute. Is there any particular reason, why the current workflow used as is ? Regards, Zsombor On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 12:28 PM, Gautam Borad <gbo...@gmail.com> wrote: > +1 for Madhan's recommendations, > > Colm, I agree that we should not discourage new contributions. However, I > think, we should also not encourage such single line/whitespace > contributions. We want contributors who can do more functionals/feature > changes and while doing that they can also fix the trivial issues > (whitespace etc) > > Since each contribution to Ranger requires creating Jira/RR, if we start > having lot of such trivial contributions, the community will be overwhelmed > with activities(mails etc) like this and that can lead to ignoring of a > real functional change, when it comes. > > In fact, the Apache page on Contributors itself says : > > "Being a contributor simply means that you take an interest in the project > and contribute in some way, ranging from asking sensible questions (which > documents the project and provides feedback to developers) through to > providing *new features* as patches." > > > So yes, we should encourage contributors, but encourage them to try and > understand Ranger and add more features/functionalities and eventually > "earn" the title of a committer. Thanks. > > > > On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 2:19 PM, Colm O hEigeartaigh <cohei...@apache.org> > wrote: > > > Hi Madhan, > > > > Trivial commits provide a path to get new contributors on board to the > > project - something that the project needs IMO. Yes it may make > backporting > > fixes a little more difficult, but it's hardly an intractable problem to > > figure out some whitespace changes between branches - it's not as if > Ranger > > is a particularly large project. > > > > Having said that I agree that some of the very trivial patches could > maybe > > be consolidated a bit more. I will encourage future review requests that > > have a very trivial spelling fix to hold on to the fix for a while, so > that > > we can fix multiple spelling fixes etc. at the same time. > > > > Colm. > > > > On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 7:27 AM, Madhan Neethiraj <mad...@apache.org> > > wrote: > > > > > All, > > > > > > > > > > > > I notice a number of recent patches address trivial issues like white > > > space, spelling mistakes (one patch just changed a single letter in a > > > label). And few other patches update a large number of files for > > > trivial/non-functional changes – like whitespaces. I strongly suggest > we > > > refrain from authoring/encouraging such patches – for many reasons. One > > of > > > the main reasons is the overhead such updates add in backporting > > > real/critical fixes (that would come later) to other branches, as these > > > changes might force dealing with merge conflicts. > > > > > > > > > > > > Since the changes introduced in such patches are not essential, I would > > > suggest to take these up when these source files are updated for other > > > functional fixes. I would greatly appreciate if the patches focus on > > > fixing/enhancing Ranger functionality; this would be benefit the > > community > > > immensely. > > > > > > > > > > > > Thanks, > > > > > > Madhan > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > Colm O hEigeartaigh > > > > Talend Community Coder > > http://coders.talend.com > > > > > > -- > Regards, > Gautam. >
