[openstack-dev] Garbage patches for simple typo fixes

Doug Hellmann doug at doughellmann.com
Fri Sep 22 17:43:11 UTC 2017


Excerpts from Matt Riedemann's message of 2017-09-22 08:26:31 -0500:
> On 9/22/2017 7:10 AM, Tom Barron wrote:
> > FWIW I think it is better not to attribute motivation in these cases.
> > Perhaps the code submitter is trying to pad stats, but perhaps they are
> > just a new contributor trying to learn the process with a "harmless"
> > patch, or just a compulsive clean-upper who hasn't thought through the
> > costs in reviewer time and CI resources.
> 
> I agree. However, the one that set me off last night was a person from 
> one company who I've repeatedly -1ed the same types of patches in nova 
> for weeks, including on stable branches, and within 10 minutes of each 
> other across several repos, so it's clearly part of some daily routine. 
> That's what prompted me to send something to the mailing list.
> 

As fungi points out, education and communication are likely to be
our best solution. Maybe one approach is to identify the companies
and individuals involved and find one of our community members to
contact them directly via email.  We would want the person doing
that to be willing to explain all of the reasons the community does
not want the sort of activity we are rejecting and to provide
guidance about more useful contributions (Matt's comment is a great
start on both). I imagine that conversation would take a good deal
of patience, especially after the second or third time, but a personal
touch frequently makes all the difference in these sorts of cases.

If we have someone willing to step into that sort of role, I would
be happy to help craft the initial contact messages and advise as
needed.

Does anyone want to volunteer to work with me and actually send the
emails?

Doug



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