On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Alan Gates <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Aug 31, 2012, at 4:19 PM, Travis Crawford wrote: > >> Thanks for starting this discussion Alan! >> >> Something we might try is having "patch available" issues mailed to >> the list each day, and working towards managing the list to 0, by >> either committing or bouncing back to "open" if it need more work. I >> personally subscribe to that jira query and find it quite useful. > +1, being reminded every day what needs looked at should help us. >
Sounds good. I filed https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-5220 requesting this report be sent to hcatalog-dev (I don't have permissions to set it up). >> Maybe this is obvious to those with more open source experience, but >> I'm learning each "external" patch bears some amount of risk, since >> how it fits into the contributors overall goals may not have been >> communicated well. We could use "epic stories" or design docs to >> communicate high-level goals so the purpose of external patches is >> more clear. For example, I'm super focused on thrift support which >> explains a lot of our patches, but wouldn't be clear to a reviewer >> looking at them in isolation. This could help reduce risk of accepting >> patches since it would be clear how they fit into bigger-picture >> goals. > +1. > > I think there's two important things here. One communicating clearly what > you're doing, and two where you communicate that. > > For anything beyond a simple bug fix it's very helpful for reviewers if you > say what use case you're trying to solve, what changes you will make, how > those changes will fit in with the current system, and how you plan to test > your changes. > > For small features this can all be done in the JIRA for the feature. For > bigger features or things that will span several JIRAs one could use an > umbrella JIRA or wiki. > > I think we should add this to the How To Contribute doc on wiki so that we > can point contributors to it. > Agreed - I just added a "Contributor Roadmaps" section to the wiki. Feel free to update if I missed anything! https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/HCATALOG/HowToContribute#HowToContribute-ContributorRoadmaps Following this new advice, I'll create an umbrella jira for adding ThriftSerde support to HCatalog. --travis > Alan. > >> >> Just tossing some ideas out, curious what others think. >> >> --Travis >> >> On Aug 31, 2012, at 4:04 PM, Alan Gates <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> It is pretty clear that we, the HCatalog committers, are not doing a good >>> enough job of reviewing patches in a timely manner. Many committers or >>> other contributors are posting patches only to have them wait for a couple >>> of weeks before someone reviews them. Then when any requested changes have >>> been made it is another couple of weeks before a +1 and the code can be >>> checked in. This is bad for a number of reasons. It makes it hard for >>> committers to move forward with what they are working on. It does not >>> encourage others to join our community, as we appear to be spurning their >>> contributions. And it means that users do not get access to bug fixes and >>> new features as soon as they could. >>> >>> We as a community need to figure out how we want to resolve this. >>> Suggestions? >>> >>> Alan. >
