[openstack-dev] [hacking] rules for removal

Kevin L. Mitchell kevin.mitchell at rackspace.com
Tue Jun 24 22:09:02 UTC 2014


On Tue, 2014-06-24 at 22:26 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> There's two sides to this coin - concern about alienating
> non-english-as-a-first-language speakers who feel undervalued because
> their language is nitpicked to death and concern about alienating
> english-as-a-first-language speakers who struggle to understand unclear
> or incorrect language.

Actually, I think there's a third case which is the one people seem to
be worried about here: non-English-as-a-first-language speakers who are
trying to read English written by other non-English-as-a-first-language
speakers.

> Obviously there's a balance to be struck there and different people will
> judge that differently, but I'm personally far more concerned about the
> former rather than the latter case.

So, my personal experience is that, as long as you express your
corrections kindly, most non-English-as-a-first-language speakers are
receptive and appreciative of corrections.  They should be
*corrections*, though: "Actually, I think you meant '…'; that would be
clearer."  Further, unless there are egregious problems, I always try to
express my language suggestions as "femtonits", meaning that I don't
down-vote a patch for those issues (unless perhaps there are a *lot* of
them).  The only time I don't suggest corrections is when I really can't
understand what was meant, in which case I try to ask questions to help
clarify the meaning…

> Absolutely, and I try and be clear about that with e.g. "not a -1" or
> "if you're rebasing anyway, perhaps fix this".
> 
> Maybe a convention for such comments would be a good thing? We often do
> 'nitpick' or 'femtonit', but they are often still things people are
> -1ing on.

Perhaps we should "formalize" the terminology, maybe by documenting that
"femtonit" should mean this in something like the review checklist?  We
could pair that with a glossary of terms that could be referred to by
the "your first patch" bot and mentioned in the Gerrit workflow page.
That way, reviewers are using a consistent terminology—"femtonit" is
hardly standard English, after all; it's a specialty term we've invented
—and developers have guidance on what it means and what they should do
in response to it.
-- 
Kevin L. Mitchell <kevin.mitchell at rackspace.com>
Rackspace




More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list