On 05/11/11 17:47, MZMcBride wrote:
The process has evolved quite a bit over time. At some
point, it was on
MediaWiki.org. Tim moved it to an OTRS queue and now there's some sort of
Star Chamber involved in deciding who gets commit access.
The main reason I moved it to OTRS was so that messages from
requesters would send me an email notification, allowing me to shorten
the response time. While it was on the wiki, I only managed to check
it about once a month. With OTRS, I could do batches of new requests
once a week, and respond to followups immediately.
The current system involves a weekly phone meeting involving Sumana
and a couple of developers, consisting mostly of silence as people
read tickets and code. The outcomes for each ticket are basically:
1. Sumana finds some problem with how the request was written. She'll
make a note and eventually send a followup asking for more
information. No code review is done.
2. Code review is done and looks fine. Sumana makes a note and
approves the request within a day or so.
3. Code review is done and there is some problem. Usually the
developer will make a private note, and then Sumana will handle
writing the response.
4. Oops, out of time. Outcome deferred for another week.
The old system wasn't perfect. I didn't really like writing
rejections, so for some people, I left the ticket open for months when
I didn't want to approve them. And a couple of times, I put the whole
thing out of my mind for a month or so and didn't approve anyone.
The theory behind this new system was that Sumana would be able to
communicate with volunteers with more tact and grace than a developer
would be able to manage, and would be able to follow up rapidly, thus
leading to happier new committers who are more willing to contribute.
For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be working as planned. I think
some changes are required.
The license issue sounds like a red herring. The basic
requirement is that
your code be compatible with the code it adapts/modifies and that it be
FOSS. If people are getting caught up in petty copyright bullshit paranoia,
they need to be taken out 'round back.
He wanted to have a contributor agreement which required anyone who
changed the file in Subversion to assign copyright to him. The content
was all under a BSD-style license and anyone could modify it, so the
contract would have to have the form "if you agree to assign
copyright, I will agree to allow you to commit to this file".
This kind of agreement is quite common in certain circles, but for it
to work, the person who you're making the contract with has to be able
to restrict write access to the source code repository. Since Olivier
wasn't going to be able to restrict commit access himself, and we
weren't going to do it for him, the contributor agreement didn't make
sense.
Olivier gave a detailed response. The complexity of the issue seems to
have resulted in Olivier's ticket being left in the "too hard" basket
for about a month.
The smiles and nice words seem to be a lot of
passive-aggressiveness. I've
seen some similarly disturbing behavior lately on Bugzilla, where patches
are greeted with "great, thanks for submitting this patch; we haven't
reviewed it, but maybe at some point we might; why don't you contribute more
in the meantime?"
It's not passive-aggressive, it's just misjudged.
-- Tim Starling