Open Stack

Summarizing people's comments in one message, but if nothing else please 
skip to the bottom (it's important):

> Though I do understand push back to fix larger standards 
> transgressions, for example some while ago I had a larger section I 
> submitted with lots of examples where the spacing the the <screen> 
> sections were all wrong so pointing out the error in the first one and 
> saying "please check and fix the others" was completely appropriate. 

For something like that, I completely agree; I mean, that's not what I 
consider a "minor cosmetic issue".

> I tend to agree with Andreas that merging the change and oepning 
> another bug for style/syntax is likely to accumulate debt, unless we 
> get an influx of pre-summit people looking for cheap commits to get 
> ATC badges. 

I don't see this as a problem.  As I said, we NEED a pool of these for 
first time contributors.  If nothing else, these are the things that are 
reeeeeally easy for someone to knock off in an afternoon if they get out 
of control.  (If necessary to move things forward, I will volunteer.)

> For my part I tend to scan bugs when I have time (infrequently) for 
> things that I have technical experience in actually doing, grammar 
> isn't going to catch my interest. 

No, but there are lots of writers who don't have the technical 
experience in a lot of what we do, but grammar they can handle.

> But we have to tell a contributor about our conventions to have high
> quality standards - and I agree that we should do this in a nice way.
Agreed.  But we can do that with (as Diane suggested) a non-voting 
comment, which can ask them to open a second bug if they can't get to it 
to fix it.  And even if they don't, if this is something that's truly a 
problem (rather than an irritation) somebody will open another bug.

> Which patch is triggering that that has so important information in it
> that it needs to go out half way?

This didn't come from a specific patch, but more of a general 
experience.  (This was more of a "That's it, I've got to say something," 
kind of thing. :))

I'm not looking to completely dismantle the way we ensure quality, and I 
don't think that this will do that.  I'm simply looking to create a 
friendlier environment for contributors as we attempt to broaden our base.

PLEASE READ THIS:  The reality is that I have had multiple people tell 
me that they either dread submitting patches, or have stopped 
contributing altogether because it's such an unpleasant experience. We 
need to take this seriously and see what we can do to solve the problem.

If we find that making a policy like this causes more harm than good, we 
can always change it back later.

----  Nick