Actually what this community got away with is pretty much an anti-pattern
compared to every other Apache project I have seen. And may I say in a not so
Apache way.
Waiting for a committer to assign a patch to someone leaves it as a privilege
to a committer. Not alluding to anything fishy in practice, but this also
leaves a lot of open ground for self-interest. Committers defining notions of
good fit / level of experience do not work, highly subjective and lead to group
control.
In terms of semantics, here is what most other projects (dare I say every
Apache project?) that I have seen do
- A new contributor comes in who is not yet added to the JIRA project. He/she
requests one of the project's JIRA admins to add him/her.
- After that, he or she is free to assign tickets to themselves.
- What this means
-- Assigning a ticket to oneself is a signal to the rest of the community
that he/she is actively working on the said patch.
-- If multiple contributors want to work on the same patch, it needs to
resolved amicably through open communication. On JIRA, or on mailing lists. Not
by the whim of a committer.
- Common issues
-- Land grabbing: Other contributors can nudge him/her in case of
inactivity and take them over. Again, amicably instead of a committer making
subjective decisions.
-- Progress stalling: One contributor assigns the ticket to himself/herself
is actively debating but with no real code/docs contribution or with any real
intention of making progress. Here workable, reviewable code for review usually
wins.
Assigning patches is not a privilege. Contributors at Apache are a bunch of
volunteers, the PMC should let volunteers contribute as they see fit. We do not
assign work at Apache.
+Vinod
On Apr 22, 2015, at 12:32 PM, Patrick Wendell <pwend...@gmail.com> wrote:
> One over arching issue is that it's pretty unclear what "Assigned to
> X" in JIAR means from a process perspective. Personally I actually
> feel it's better for this to be more historical - i.e. who ended up
> submitting a patch for this feature that was merged - rather than
> creating an exclusive reservation for a particular user to work on
> something.
>
> If an issue is "assigned" to person X, but some other person Y submits
> a great patch for it, I think we have some obligation to Spark users
> and to the community to merge the better patch. So the idea of
> reserving the right to add a feature, it just seems overall off to me.
> IMO, its fine if multiple people want to submit competing patches for
> something, provided everyone comments on JIRA saying they are
> intending to submit a patch, and everyone understands there is
> duplicate effort. So commenting with an intention to submit a patch,
> IMO seems like the healthiest workflow since it is non exclusive.
>
> To me the main benefit of "assigning" something ahead of time is if
> you have a committer that really wants to see someone specific work on
> a patch, it just acts as a strong signal that there is someone
> endorsed to work on that patch. That doesn't mean no one else can
> submit a patch, but it is IMO more of a warning that there may be
> existing work which is likely to be high quality, to avoid duplicated
> effort.
>
> When it was really easy to assign features to themselves, I saw a lot
> of anti-patterns in the community that seemed unhealthy, specifically:
>
> - It was really unclear what it means semantically if someone is
> assigned to a JIRA.
> - People assign JIRA's to themselves that aren't a good fit, given the
> authors level of experience.
> - People expect if they assign JIRA's to themselves that others won't
> submit patches, and become upset if they do.
> - People are discouraged from working on a patch because someone else
> was officially assigned.
>
> - Patrick
>
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 11:13 AM, Sean Owen <so...@cloudera.com> wrote:
>> Anecdotally, there are a number of people asking to set the Assignee
>> field. This is currently restricted to Committers in JIRA. I know the
>> logic was to prevent people from Assigning a JIRA and then leaving it;
>> it also matters a bit for questions of "credit".
>>
>> Still I wonder if it's best to just let people go ahead and set it, as
>> the lesser "evil". People can already do a lot like resolve JIRAs and
>> set shepherd and critical priority and all that.
>>
>> I think the intent was to let "Developers" set this, but maybe due to
>> an error, that's not how the current JIRA permission is implemented.
>>
>> I ask because I'm about to ping INFRA to update our scheme.
>>
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