On 26-May-20 8:31 AM, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
On 5/26/20 9:06 AM, Tom Barbette wrote:
Le 25/05/2020 à 22:34, Thomas Monjalon a écrit :
25/05/2020 20:44, Morten Brørup:
From: Thomas Monjalon
25/05/2020 18:09, Burakov, Anatoly:
obviously, but i have a suspicion that we'll get more of it if we
lower
the barrier for entry (not the barrier for merge!). I think there is
a
way to lower the secondary skill level needed to contribute to DPDK
without lowering coding/merge standards with it.
That is exactly what I am asking for: Lowering the barrier and
increasing the feeling of success for newcomers. (The barrier for
merge is probably fine; I'll leave that discussion to the maintainers.)
I understand.
About the barrier for entry, maybe it is not obvious because I don't
communicate a lot about it, but please be aware that I (and other
maintainers I think) are doing a lot of changes in newcomer patches
to avoid asking them knowing the whole process from the beginning.
Then frequent contributors get educated on the way.
Great! I wish that every developer would think and behave this way.
I think the only real barrier we have is to sign the patch
with a real name and send an email to right list.
The ask for SoB real name is probably what started this thread
in Morten's mind. And the SoB requirement will *never* change.
The incorrect Signed-off-by might be the only hard barrier (which we
cannot avoid). But that did not trigger me.
I was raising the discussion to bring attention to soft barriers for
contributors. What triggered me was the request to split the patch
into multiple patches; a kind of feedback I have seen before. For an
experienced git user, this is probably very easy, but for a git
newbie (like myself), it basically means starting all over and trying
to figure out the right set of git commands to do this, which can be
perceived as a difficult task requiring a lot of effort.
Yes I am aware about this difficulty.
It is basically knowing git-reset and git-add -p.
I agree a cookbook for this kind of thing is required.
I would like to do the split for newcomers,
but we need also to validate the explanations of each commit.
A solution in such case is to send the split so the newbie can just
fill what is missing.
This kind of workflow is really what we should look at improving.
Perhaps we could supplement the Contributor Guidelines with a set of
cookbooks for different steps in the contribution process, so
reviewers can be refer newcomers to the relevant of these as part of
the feedback. Just like any professional customer support team has a
set of canned answers ready for common customer issues. (Please note:
I am not suggesting adding an AI/ML chat bot reviewer to the mailing
list!)
OK
The amount of Contributor Guideline documentation is also a
balance... it must be long enough to contain the relevant information
to get going, but short enough for newcomers to bother reading it.
Yes, we need short intros and long explanations when really needed.
It is touching another issue: we lack some documentation love.
Maybe we could find something that allows to "git push" to the
patchwork, where it kind of appears already as a github-like discussion?
It doesn't miss a lot to enable writing from the website directly
(basically auto-email).
Personnaly I've put a lot of efforts to fix simple comments, be sure
that I wrote "v2" here, sign-off there, cc-ed the right person, not mess
my the format-patch versions, changed only the cover letter, ... Quite
afraid of bothering that big mailing list for nothing.
Maybe using git-publish would help here:
https://github.com/stefanha/git-publish
Using the simple git-puslish command, it manages revisions
automatically, open an editor for the cover letter, can run some scripts
to add proper maintainers, and hook available to run basic checks,
etc...
Good to see that i've reinvented the wheel yet again, as this looks
almost exactly like the set of scripts i wrote for myself to automate
patch submission :D
We could add a .gitpublish file to automate adding right maintainers
depending on the branch, etc...
For example, for Qemu the .gitpublish file looks like this:
https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/.gitpublish
I'm infrequent enough to have te re-learn every time basically. It would
be much easier with a git push, a fast online review of the diff, as on
github/gitlab, and done. Also, those allow online edits, and therefore
allows "elders" to do small fixes directly in the "patch". Some fixes
are not worth the discussion and the chain of mails. That's what I'm
missing the most personnaly.
Tom
--
Thanks,
Anatoly
