Re: [gentoo-dev] The demotivating process of contributing to devmanual

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

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On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 1:59 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2019-10-15 at 16:47 -0400, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 4:35 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > > Hello, everyone.
> > >
> > > I'd like to highlight a major problem with devmanual.  For a basic
> > > policy & developer documentation thingie, it's quality is so-so at
> best.
> > > A lot of stuff is missing, lots of things are outdated or even
> > > incorrect.  Not many people are contributing, and those who try quickly
> > > resign.
> >
> > Maybe you should join the project? Especially if you are making major
> > contributions.
>
> Are you suggesting that I join the project and start committing without
> review, or disregarding review?  I have serious doubts on joining
> the project if I am repeatedly proven to be doing things wrong --
> whether the issues were serious or not.
>
> >
> > > Most of my pull requests were apparently approved, so they might be
> > > finally merged some day.
> >
> > I believe all devs have push access to that repo, so you could just
> > push the changes yourself if there are no reasonable objections.
>
> I never realized that.
>
> >
> > Minor mistakes happen, and can be corrected after the fact.
> >
>

One tactic here is to just timebound the reviews. 2 weeks between posting a
PR and getting a review is too long IMHO. Post a PR and say you will merge
it in 72 hours or something. If it's wrong, it can be fixed after the fact
as floppym notes.

If I'm at work and someone has sent me a patch and the patch is good but
there are some minor spelling / grammar fixes they can make I will
basically reply pointing out the problems (so they can fix them) but I also
tell them to merge once the fixes are applied. This means they don't need
to wait for me to "review" the spelling fixes. Obviously there is both
trust (in that I assume they did what I asked) and tooling (we have a tool
where I write comments like "you spelled foobare wrong here, should be
'foobar'" and they have to click "RESOLVE" on each item; you can't submit a
PR with 'unresolved' items open) so there is some pressure to "do the right
thing."

-A


>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>

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