Open Stack

Thanks for being brave enough to say it publicly. Not sure how many
more times I can stomach reading such classic patches as "Optimize the
link address" or "Replace six.iteritems() with .items()".

Yes, it is still possible for us to be an open community while also
minimizing the amount of useless patches.

Messages like the sample Matt provided are part of the solution.
Resisting the urge to -2/force-abandon without explanation is part of
the solution, too. But they aren't the whole solution.

The TC's emerging Top 5 help-wanted list is a step in the right
direction towards solving this problem. Let's publicize the crap out
of that. And we can go further, with project-specific help wanted
lists. And how about a better way to identify and promote issues which
are both low-hanging fruit AND important (they aren't actually that
rare!).

Turning towards more radical solutions: 1) Bake something into
git-review which will print out some agreed-up community guidelines
for what constitutes a useful patch, as well as any
repository-specific guidelines. To keep it reasonable, only show the
message the first time a contributor submits to that repository. 2)
Register fingerprints of common unhelpful patches and have a bot
similar to Elastic Recheck automatically review and comment. 3) Delay
spin-up of resource-intensive/long-running CI jobs until after some
initial review has been added or time has passed. Authorized
contributors, not necessarily synonymous with cores, can override the
delay if there's a critical patch which needs to get through the queue
quickly.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head, so feel free to tear me apart.

Looking forward to seeing where this conversation goes this time around.



On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 10:21 PM, Matt Riedemann <mriedemos at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just wanted to highlight to people that there seems to be a series of
> garbage patches in various projects [1] which are basically doing things
> like fixing a single typo in a code comment, or very narrowly changing http
> to https in links within docs.
>
> Also +1ing ones own changes.
>
> I've been trying to snuff these out in nova, but I see it's basically a
> pattern widespread across several projects.
>
> This is the boilerplate comment I give with my -1, feel free to employ it
> yourself.
>
> "Sorry but this isn't really a useful change. Fixing typos in code comments
> when the context is still clear doesn't really help us, and mostly seems
> like looking for padding stats on stackalytics. It's also a drain on our CI
> environment.
>
> If you fixed all of the typos in a single module, or in user-facing
> documentation, or error messages, or something in the logs, or something
> that actually doesn't make sense in code comments, then maybe, but this
> isn't one of those things."
>
> I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but this is annoying to the point I felt
> the need to say something publicly.
>
> [1] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/author:%255E.*inspur.*
>
> --
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt
>
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