On Tuesday, 5 January 2016 at 14:18:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
Overall my understanding of your message is "My system would be
better not for a fundamental technical reason, but because I am
willing to pour in it time and talent." This is the kind of
argument I have a lot of respect for.
IMO it's not just his willingness to put in the time that is
different. There are some critical technical differences:
- There is one person making the decision.
- You don't have to worry about unstated (and sometimes
arbitrary) rules. The current system feels like your dealing with
the Soup Nazi.
- You don't have to mess with Git. For me, that's a big one,
because I've never used Git for a large project like this.
- You don't have to build the whole website. You don't have to do
Phobos unit tests to change a broken link.
I'll give you an example. Not by coincidence, this was the last
contribution I attempted to make.
I read the documentation for schwartzSort, and finding that it
conveyed no information, I wanted to suggest something better. A
discussion forum or email message would be the ideal way to do
so, but knowing that's not how things are done here, I decided to
submit a PR. After at least a couple hours (it may have been
more) looking at other documentation to find ideas for how to do
it better, doing several revisions to get to something I found
satisfactory, checking for no trailing spaces and making sure the
syntax was consistent with the other documentation, battling with
Git, and battling to get the full site to build, I submitted this:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3831
One person reviewed it and didn't like my change, because he felt
the existing documentation was better. Later, someone commented
that he liked my version. And now it's sitting there. It's not
going to be accepted and because nobody's in charge of the
documentation it won't be closed either.
The problem is not that my PR was (for practical purposes)
rejected. As an academic I deal with both sides of peer review
all the time. The problem is that I was forced to put so much
time into it just to make a suggestion. With Adam's project, I
can send him an email with a suggested change, and he can do as
he wishes with it. It will take two minutes of my time.
