On 26/09/13 14:52, Phil Holmes wrote:
I thought I made this clear - I was repeating something Graham said to me on a
number of occasions. He would argue it was realistic, not pessimistic. You have
to be aware of the fact that, simply by working hard on a problem does not
guarantee that the effort expended will be rewarded.
Here's a direct quote from him - clearly you don't fall into the category of new
contributor, but the warning still applies:
"We've had bad experiences where a helpful and enthusiastic new
contributor misunderstood the instructions, ran off and did 5 hours of
work instead of 10 minutes, and none of the main developers wanted to
take the time to deal with the results of the 5-hour work, so the
whole thing was wasted. (literally wasted, as in "the project would
have received more benefit from the 10-minute job instead of the
5-hour work")"
Check the results of the grand regression test review.
This risks becoming another corrosive discussion, so please understand that what
I say next is not intended as an attack on anyone here and is meant in a spirit
of hope for Lilypond's prosperous future.
There is another possible response to such a situation, and it's: "Oh wow, this
person put a load of work in, they're obviously really committed and
enthusiastic. OK, let's use these problems with what they've done as an
opportunity to educate them better about how Lilypond works and how to avoid
these kinds of problem in the future, and make them feel that we really value
the time they've put in and want to repay them in kind."
Now, I'm not assuming that no one has ever done this. I rather imagine it's
been tried and that the resulting workload (probably mostly Graham's) has been
overwhelming and that in fact there is no guarantee that it pays off in terms of
another long-term contributor -- so people have been discouraged from this
approach by hard experience. But I still think that it's possible to approach
contributors with enthusiastic caution rather than lowered expectations, which
are demoralizing for everyone.
FWIW I think automated testing of pull requests is helpful here because test
failures are impersonal and encourage the contributor to pro-actively sort out
the problems in their code without having to be told -- there's not the same
sense of personal rejection.
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