Open Stack

> On Feb 25, 2015, at 10:26 AM, Ruby Loo <rlooyahoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering what people thought about patches that only fix grammatical issues or misspellings in comments in our code.
> 
> I can't believe I'm sending out this email, but as a group, I'd like it if we had  a similar understanding so that we treat all patches in a similar (dare I say it, consistent) manner. I've seen negative votes and positive (approved) votes for similar patches. Right now, I look at such submitted patches and ignore them, because I don't know what the fairest thing is. I don't feel right that a patch that was previously submitted gets a -2, whereas another patch gets a +A.
> 
> To be clear, I think that anything that is user-facing like (log, exception) messages or our documentation should be cleaned up. (And yes, I am fine using British or American English or a mix here.)
> 
> What I'm wondering about are the fixes to docstrings and inline comments that aren't externally visible.
> 
> On one hand, It is great that someone submits a patch so maybe we should approve it, so as not to discourage the submitter. On the other hand, how useful are such submissions. It has already been suggested (and maybe discussed to death) that we should approve patches if there are only nits. These grammatical and misspellings fall under nits. If we are explicitly saying that it is OK to merge these nits, then why fix them later, unless they are part of a patch that does more than only address those nits?
> 
> I realize that it would take me less time to approve the patches than to write this email, but I wanted to know what the community thought. Some rule-of-thumb would be helpful to me.
> 

I personally always ask this question: does it make the software better? IMO fixing some of these grammatical issues can. I don’t think we should actively encourage such patches, but if someone already did the work, why should we run them away? Many folks use patches like this to help them learn the process for contributing to OpenStack and I’d hate to run them away.

These changes tend to bubble up because they’re an easy way to get involved. The time it takes to review and merge them in is an investment in that person’s future interest in contributing to OpenStack, or possibly open source in general. 

-Jay


> Thoughts?
> 
> --ruby
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