On Sun, 11 Oct 2015 09:56:28 -0700 Matt Turner <matts...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 1:17 AM, wraeth <wra...@wraeth.id.au> wrote: > > I am one of the users who spoke to idella4 about this, but I wanted > > to repeat this publicly in order to highlight the point of view of > > contributing user as opposed to a developer. > > > > Firstly I would like to say that I appreciate feedback on my work - > > it helps me to improve the quality of my work both for Gentoo and > > personally. > > > > I also agree whole-heartedly to the concept of the Reviewers > > project, in that highlighting common improvements that could be > > made would benefit both contributors who participate and Gentoo as > > a whole. > > > > Having said that, however, I do not appreciate the method in which > > these criticisms were delivered, and believe it extends beyond the > > idea of the Reviewers project. > > > > I feel that it is inappropriate for criticisms of contributor's > > work to be broadcast on a mailing list that is read not only by the > > developer community, but by users as well, without their consent. > > This is not a case where I am particularly embarrassed or upset - > > if others can learn from my mistakes, then they are mistakes I am > > happy to make (preferably only once). But doing so publicly, with > > identifying information, is inappropriate. > > Good grief. Seriously? > > Mailing list review is the *norm* in the free software world. > > I haven't seen anything noted that should have caused embarrassment. > > This whole thing, as far as I can see, is about improving the quality > of Gentoo. I have learned from the reviewers reviewing my commits and > the commits of others. It's extremely valuable to do this in public > and the idea that noting an error on a public mailing list is somehow > bad is simply misguided. > I don't think that is the issue. Contributing to a public repo (gentoo-x86) makes your commits public, so everyone can look at them and comment. Reviews started all of the sudden with stylistic nitpicks (sometimes even wrong), asking people to justify themselves, or even focusing on irrelevant things, all of which sent to -dev ml making it the majority of its traffic. This caused bad perception and bad reactions against reviews, myself first, even if some were actually useful and interesting. However, the reviewer project seems to have reacted well to these critics and has adapted, so I think it'll end up bringing real improvements indeed. As for your statement that mailing list review is the norm, well, not quite here: Some projects require pre-commit reviews by mailing lists, we don't. When a user wants to submit a patch, he is directed to bugzilla (or github), not to git send-mail to gentoo-dev ml. Some projects do post-commit reviews on their -dev ml, but usually the scale is much smaller, others reply directly to the -commits ml. We use bugzilla a lot because things are better tracked there: If the review uncovers real bugs, better use bugzilla. We use -dev ml for discussing matters of general interest to the community; for discussing every single coma of a specific ebuild, better do it privately or in a dedicated ml if several people are interested in it. Alexis.
