On 05/24/2012 01:32 AM, Greg Stein wrote:
Hey all,
I moderated this through, in order to start a discussion.
My feeling is: this is not how we want to accept patches. This
approach is completely disconnected from our community. How do we talk
to the person providing the change? How do we ask for modifications?
How to interact?
As someone who spends more time coding and deploying three-tier systems
dependent upon a large number of different projects (Scala, Guava,
Spring, Boost, Python, Ice, etc) than working on svn (except when we run
into an issue with svn itself ;) ) I appreciate the ease to quickly get
a patch into a project I'm dependent upon. I prefer to submit patches
than maintain private copies of upstream code. So I like the idea that
people can do a small amount of work and get it into the project, even
if it's as tiny as documentation patches when I'm reading the project's
docs.
I care to try to follow the project's coding conventions and log
messages, but that's because I've been trained in this project and know
that projects can be sensitive to that. So I can see this being an
issue for drive-by patches.
But even larger: our goal is to get people *involved* in our
community. There isn't any obvious way to get 'techtonik' brought into
our community unless they come to the dev@ list.
I think that's a good goal, but people don't want to be turned off by a
lot of process in accepting a patch either.
That said... we *do* accept patches via the issue tracker on
subversion.tigris.org. Are we ready to accept patches through a
separate channel? Personally, I'm not ready to say "hey, any channel
on the planet is fine. please... feel free! devise new channels! we
are willing to review 100 channels for incoming patches!"
I like GitHub. It is a very, very well-done site. But I'm not ready to
say that it is a viable mechanism for people to deliver patches. My
preference is for those to arrive here on dev@, where we can interact
with the person. Not as some drive-by, fait accompli.
I think that's too hard. I would rather accept work from somebody who
doesn't have the goal of joining Subversion then not getting the work at
all. Many of the projects I've contributed to was work to get done what
I needed for my projects, but that still helped the open-source project
that I was using over all. I don't have the time to join every project
I use.
Blair
