On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Aaron S. Meurer <asmeu...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Apr 30, 2011, at 4:22 PM, Ondrej Certik wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> thanks Ronan, Vinzent, Aaron, Mateusz and Brian for participating in >> the discussion. First of all, I would like to assure you that there >> are no hard feelings on my side, and hopefully we can learn something >> form it, and resolve things. I would like to write my very clear >> opinion on some of the issues raised in this thread: >> >> 1) This feature is a core feature, that SymPy should have >> >> 2) It is ok to give -1 for reviews, as long as you give a plan for the >> author of the patch, how he can fix it, so that it is acceptable. It >> is also ok to give -1 without saying anything else (this case), but >> then this stops progress, because it is not clear what I can do to get >> this in. As such, when you do such "-1" as a reviewer, you should >> think twice what this is going to cause, and initiate a discussion >> about this. >> >> 3) Vinzent asked, why I was upset. So the reason being, that something >> that I personally strongly believe belongs into sympy was given -1 >> without any constructive technical criticism. As far as I know, we >> have never pushed in a patch, that was clearly given -1 as this one. >> So as such, I felt, that this means, this can't go in. And as such I >> was upset, because suddenly I will not be able to achieve the goal to >> be able to do things that people do with Mathematica with SymPy, not >> because the code was not there, but because some of sympy developers >> gave it -1, because they don't share my vision. And as such, I was >> upset. I think that's understandable, isn't it? :) In any case, let me >> reiterate, that I am upset at the situation, not Ronan, or anybody >> else. >> >> 4) So now the question is what to do now. Well, my first idea was to >> convince Ronan to give it +1. That's of course the best. But if that >> is not possible, we can of course push it in anyway (given all the +1 >> that it got from other developers). But that is really something, that >> I, as a democratic person, really hate to do. Because "-1" is like a >> veto. That's how it worked so far. Maybe this point needs further >> discussion among us. At least I always considered "-1" as a veto. And >> as such, the code can't be pushed in, unless the situation is >> resolved. >> >> Ondřej > > Well, to me, the definition of "democratic" means a majority :) > > As the community gets larger, I think it will be necessary to not always have > a unanimous decision on everything. Certainly we should aim for it, and we > shouldn't just ignore −1's (especially if it is a technical issue). But if > it comes down to a disagreement that isn't going to change, we will have to > just look to see if there is a majority opinion, or at least if there is a > consensus in a looser sense of the word (like 5 +1's vs. 1 −1). > > If you really want a unanimous decision every time, you will only end up > getting the highest quality code being pushed in, and you shouldn't complain > when anything less doesn't make it. But I think that that is a bad way to do > things, for the same reason that you should "release early and release often" > (see > http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html).
I think that the rule of thumb can be simply said -- do your best to "keep all sympy devs happy". If one of them gives -1, do the best to get it resolved (one way or another). Ondrej -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
