Open Stack

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:

> Excerpts from David Kranz's message of 2013-11-11 09:58:59 -0800:
> > I have seen a wide variety of -1'ing (and in many cases approving)
> > patches for minor spelling or grammatical errors and think we need a
> > policy about this. Given the large number of contributors for whom
> > English is not their native language, I would be in favor of rejecting
> > spelling errors in variable or method names but being more lenient in
> > comments, commit messages, READMEs, etc. What do you all think?
> >
>
> The point of code review is to find defects. Misspelled words are defects
> in the English language encoded in the change. In fact, commit messages
> in particular are critical to get right as they cannot ever be fixed,
> and they are generally the most useful when under a stressful situation
> trying to determine the nature of a regression.
>
> Many of our contributors are also newbies to python, and we do not let
> them get away with obvious mistakes in python code. English is just a
> language with a different interpreter (a more forgiving one, for sure,
> but also one with many versions at various stages of implementation).
>
> In fact, our large percentage of non-native english speakers is a reason
> to be extremely careful about grammar and spelling so as not to confuse
> non-native speakers with incorrect grammar and spelling.
>
> I believe that if a -1 for a spelling mistake is causing more than an
> extremely short turn around time then either the submitter is not engaged
> with the project and thus not responsive to the -1, or the reviewers
> are over-taxed and the given project needs more reviewers.
>
>

It would be so much nicer if there were some easy way for the reviewer
himself to fix the typos directly (in a way that can trivially be accepted
by the submitter of the patch into his own patch -- with a click of a
button).


-- 
Christopher Armstrong
http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
http://planet-if.com/
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