Open Stack

On 9/25/2017 7:24 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 09/25/2017 07:56 AM, Chris Dent wrote:
>> On Fri, 22 Sep 2017, Paul Belanger wrote:
>>
>>> This is not a good example of encouraging anybody to contribute to the
>>> project.
>> Yes. This entire thread was a bit disturbing to read. Yes, I totally
>> agree that mass patches that do very little are a big cost to
>> reviewer and CI time but a lot of the responses sound like: "go away
>> you people who don't understand our special culture and our
>> important work".
>>
>> That's not a good look.
>>
>> Matt's original comment is good in and of itself: I saw a thing,
>> let's remember to curtail this stuff and do it in a nice way.
>>
>> But then we generate a long thread about it. It's odd to me that
>> these threads sometimes draw more people out then discussions about
>> actually improving the projects.
>>
>> It's also odd that if OpenStack were small and differently
>> structured, any self-respecting maintainer would be happy to see
>> a few typo fixes and generic cleanups. Anything to push the quality
>> forward is nice. But because of the way we do review and because of
>> the way we do CI these things are seen as expensive distractions[1].
>> We're old and entrenched enough now that our tooling enforces our
>> culture and our culture enforces our tooling.
>>
>> [1] Note that I'm not denying they are expensive distractions nor
>> that they need to be managed as such. They are, but a lot of that
>> is on us.
> I was trying to ignore the thread in the hopes it would die out quick.
> But torches and pitchforks all came out from the far corners, so I'm
> going to push back on that a bit.
>
> I'm not super clear why there is always so much outrage about these
> patches. They are fixing real things. When I encounter them, I just
> approve them to get them merged quickly and not backing up the review
> queue, using more CI later if they need rebasing. They are fixing real
> things. Maybe there is a CI cost, but the faster they are merged the
> less likely someone else is to propose it in the future, which keeps
> down the CI cost. And if we have a culture of just fixing typos later,
> then we spend less CI time on patches the first time around with 2 or 3
> iterations catching typos.
Thank you for saying what I failed to say in my most recent response.  I 
know some people don't care about typos, etc but they are things that 
make us look like a lower quality community.  It is stuff to fix and I 
think we are wasting more resource in this discussion than just getting 
the patches through.
> I think the concern is the ascribed motive for why people are putting
> these up. That's fine to feel that people are stat padding (and that too
> many things are driven off metrics). But, honestly, that's only
> important if we make it important. Contributor stats are always going to
> be pretty much junk stats. They are counting things to be the same which
> are wildly variable in meaning (number of patches, number of Lines of
> Code).
>
> My personal view is just merge things that fix things that are wrong,
> don't care why people are doing it. If it gets someone a discounted
> ticket somewhere, so be it. It's really not any skin off our back in the
> process.
+2  I am going to assume the voice of reason has been heard and not 
frustrate myself further with this thread.
> If people are deeply concerned about CI resources, step one is to get
> some better accounting into the existing system to see where resources
> are currently spent, and how we could ensure that time is fairly spread
> around to ensure maximum productivity by all developers.
>
> 	-Sean
>