On 25/09/17 09:28 -0400, Doug Hellmann wrote:
Excerpts from Sean Dague's message of 2017-09-25 08:24:18 -0400:On 09/25/2017 07:56 AM, Chris Dent wrote: > On Fri, 22 Sep 2017, Paul Belanger wrote: > >> This is not a good example of encouraging anybody to contribute to the >> project. > > Yes. This entire thread was a bit disturbing to read. Yes, I totally > agree that mass patches that do very little are a big cost to > reviewer and CI time but a lot of the responses sound like: "go away > you people who don't understand our special culture and our > important work". > > That's not a good look. > > Matt's original comment is good in and of itself: I saw a thing, > let's remember to curtail this stuff and do it in a nice way. > > But then we generate a long thread about it. It's odd to me that > these threads sometimes draw more people out then discussions about > actually improving the projects. > > It's also odd that if OpenStack were small and differently > structured, any self-respecting maintainer would be happy to see > a few typo fixes and generic cleanups. Anything to push the quality > forward is nice. But because of the way we do review and because of > the way we do CI these things are seen as expensive distractions[1]. > We're old and entrenched enough now that our tooling enforces our > culture and our culture enforces our tooling. > > [1] Note that I'm not denying they are expensive distractions nor > that they need to be managed as such. They are, but a lot of that > is on us.I was trying to ignore the thread in the hopes it would die out quick. But torches and pitchforks all came out from the far corners, so I'm going to push back on that a bit. I'm not super clear why there is always so much outrage about these patches. They are fixing real things. When I encounter them, I just approve them to get them merged quickly and not backing up the review queue, using more CI later if they need rebasing. They are fixing real things. Maybe there is a CI cost, but the faster they are merged the less likely someone else is to propose it in the future, which keeps down the CI cost. And if we have a culture of just fixing typos later, then we spend less CI time on patches the first time around with 2 or 3 iterations catching typos. I think the concern is the ascribed motive for why people are putting these up. That's fine to feel that people are stat padding (and that too many things are driven off metrics). But, honestly, that's only important if we make it important. Contributor stats are always going to be pretty much junk stats. They are counting things to be the same which are wildly variable in meaning (number of patches, number of Lines of Code). My personal view is just merge things that fix things that are wrong, don't care why people are doing it. If it gets someone a discounted ticket somewhere, so be it. It's really not any skin off our back in the process. If people are deeply concerned about CI resources, step one is to get some better accounting into the existing system to see where resources are currently spent, and how we could ensure that time is fairly spread around to ensure maximum productivity by all developers. -SeanI'm less concerned with the motivation of someone submitting the patches than I am with their effect. Just like the situation we had with the bug squash days a year or so ago, if we had a poorly timed set of these trivial patches coming in at our feature freeze deadline, it would be extremely disruptive. So to me the fact that we're seeing them in large batches means we have people who are not fully engaged with the community and don't understand the impact they're having. My goal is to reach out and try to improve that engagement, and try to help them become more fully constructive contributors.
I agree with the sentinment that these patches might be coming from folks that are not fully engaged with the community but they won't stop comming. There's a risk behind this mass submitted patches but I agree with Sean's comment that they are still fixing things. Once they've been submitted, I think we're better off merging them if we're not in a release phase. A more agressive fix would be to limit the amount of patches a single person can propose in a given day and in a specific period of time (or forever) but this might not be possible or not exactly what we want as I would rather work with the community. Flavio -- @flaper87 Flavio Percoco
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