On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 10:23:00AM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote: > Graham Percival writes: > > > Gee, I wonder why we haven't seen any more patches from that new > > contributor? > > </sarcasm> > > This looks like a contributor who needs some guidance.
Yes. > It should suffice to say: please fix > indentation (there is enough other code to spot the errors) and possibly > say we use GNU style. Luckily we can now say: run fixcc. There is nothing "lucky" about that; we spent somewhere between 20 to 40 developer-hours producing the current fixcc. Note that before spending that time, we could *not* say "use GNU style" or "use emacs", since our code did not follow either of those styles (and running fixcc on certain files actually caused them to fail to compile!). I think this was a decent trade-off. Of course it would have been nice if we could have done it in "only" 10 hours of developer-time, but I'm not surprised it took as long as it did, and at least it's done now. But don't call it "lucky"; a number of people worked very hard to make it possible. > However, it seems that we lack a good policy on when to just apply a > patch from a new contributor, fix minor nits, apply it, and email them > the result: "Thanks for your patch, I have applied it with small > modifications/indentation nits, see below." > > While you should possibly not be doing that more than 2 or 3 times, this > is a very efficient way of integrating patches and communicating what > kind of code we expect. Yes; the problem is a lack of mentors. I have done this many times for documentation patches when I was mentoring new doc writers. *shrug* It's not as though I haven't been advertising and pleading developers to mentor new contributors. As a group, we are collectively not very interested in giving personal help to new contributors. At this point, I think the only sensible thing is to accept that this is the way we are, and plan our other policies around that. Related: "high context" vs. "low context" cultures in open source, from one of the Mozilla people. http://stormyscorner.com/2011/09/does-open-source-exclude-high-context-cultures.html We are almost exclusively "low context" culture in lilypond. I invested a lot of time trying to create a "high" (or at least "medium context") culture during the Grand Documentation Project, but we all know how that ended up. At this point, I think we simply need to accept that lilypond development is a fairly individual, "low context" culture, and gear our policies towards that. And also accept that we'll have far fewer contributors than we could have. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
