[openstack-dev] [tc][all] A culture change (nitpicking)

Zhipeng Huang zhipengh512 at gmail.com
Sat Jun 2 00:49:44 UTC 2018


For me nitpicking during review is really not a good experience, however i
do think we should tolerate at least one round of nitpicking.

On another aspect, the nitpicking review culture also in some way
encourage, and provide legitimacy in some way, to the padding activities.
People are feeling ok about "fixing dictionary" as we joked.



On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 4:55 AM, Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:

> On 2018-05-31 16:49:13 -0400 (-0400), John Dennis wrote:
> > On 05/30/2018 08:23 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> > > I think this is orthogonal to the thread. The idea is that we should
> > > avoid nettling contributors over minor imperfections in their
> > > submissions (grammatical, spelling or typographical errors in code
> > > comments and documentation, mild inefficiencies in implementations,
> > > et cetera). Clearly we shouldn't merge broken features, changes
> > > which fail tests/linters, and so on. For me the rule of thumb is,
> > > "will the software be better or worse if this is merged?" It's not
> > > about perfection or imperfection, it's about incremental
> > > improvement. If a proposed change is an improvement, that's enough.
> > > If it's not perfect... well, that's just opportunity for more
> > > improvement later.
> >
> > I appreciate the sentiment concerning accepting any improvement yet on
> the
> > other hand waiting for improvements to the patch to occur later is
> folly, it
> > won't happen.
> >
> > Those of us familiar with working with large bodies of code from multiple
> > authors spanning an extended time period will tell you it's very
> confusing
> > when it's obvious most of the code follows certain conventions but there
> are
> > odd exceptions (often without comments). This inevitably leads to
> investing
> > a lot of time trying to understand why the exception exists because
> "clearly
> > it's there for a reason and I'm just missing the rationale" At that point
> > the reason for the inconsistency is lost.
> >
> > At the end of the day it is more important to keep the code base clean
> and
> > consistent for those that follow than it is to coddle in the near term.
>
> Sure, I suppose it comes down to your definition of "improvement." I
> don't consider a change proposing incomplete or unmaintainable code
> to be an improvement. On the other hand I think it's fine to approve
> changes which are "good enough" even if there's room for
> improvement, so long as they're "good enough" that you're fine with
> them possibly never being improved on due to shifts in priorities.
> I'm certainly not suggesting that it's a good idea to merge
> technical debt with the expectation that someone will find time to
> solve it later (any more than it's okay to merge obvious bugs in
> hopes someone will come along and fix them for you).
> --
> Jeremy Stanley
>
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-- 
Zhipeng (Howard) Huang

Standard Engineer
IT Standard & Patent/IT Product Line
Huawei Technologies Co,. Ltd
Email: huangzhipeng at huawei.com
Office: Huawei Industrial Base, Longgang, Shenzhen

(Previous)
Research Assistant
Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Lab, Calit2
University of California, Irvine
Email: zhipengh at uci.edu
Office: Calit2 Building Room 2402

OpenStack, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, OpenCompute Aficionado
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