On 12 Dec 2004, at 17:30, Felipe Leme wrote:
I would add a note to Danny's comment: treat contributors as your primary users.
I have seem many projects (inside and outside ASF) where people submit
patches and the patches are just ignored, without even an explanation
why it was not accepted. I know that applying a patch is not that simple
in most cases, but I think the risk of breaking something is lesser than
the risk of losing a good contributor. After all, if the patch breaks
something, you can fix it later; but if you piss-off a contributor
he/she will probably put his/her efforts in another project.
there is some truth buried somewhere in there...
the time required to review, correctly and apply a patch is often underestimated. projects with too little available committer energy may get into a viscous circle whereby new committers cannot be recruited because there's too little energy to review patches. one way round this problem is to encourage users and developers to review patches submitted by others. it's also useful to try to do some sort of preliminary review and offer some kind words as soon as possible after a patch is posted even if work on the core project prevents a full review at this time.
however, the quality of patches applied is crucial to the long term health of a project. reviewing and rewriting patches is the only way that developers are taught the standards required by the project. applying substandard patches shouldn't break the project in the short term (providing that it's adequately unit tested) but often produces headaches in the medium and long term.
though committing a few risky patches in the hope of recruiting a new committer might seem like a good plan, there are definite drawbacks. the energy gained by recruiting a new committer (in this fashion) can easily be lost to the mentoring and refactoring required to produce code of the correct quality align with the goals of the project. IMHO it's almost always better (in the long term) for a developer to prove that they understand the direction and philosophy of a project by producing good patches which require no correction before they are elected a committer.
- robert
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