Re: RFC on MR 1368

[David Kastrup]

Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> writes:

> I agree that all commits should have a clearly explained and
> duly justified rationale, because a review is a request
> from the developer community to accept to collectively
> build upon and maintain new code, and to invite future
> developers to do so. On the other hand, I feel like a
> lot of this particular discussion has been Werner explaining
> background knowledge on the tooling (Metafont and FontForge
> and their issues). Font-related programming is a discipline in
> itself. I think commit messages, MR summaries and code comments
> should aim to provide motivation for the change and the design in
> a language targeted for a reader who does know about the context,
> or there would be no end to it.
>
> You are the one who does most review on code areas you
> are not primarily a specialist of, which I very much
> appreciate from experience on my own MRs, as it does catch
> smaller or bigger problems or gives perspectives that I
> hadn't thought of. However, on areas that it takes months
> or years to become an expert of (LilyPond has a number
> of those), trusting the judgement of someone who took
> that time is a necessity.

Well, the one thing we cannot trust anybody with is to be immortal in
relation to the project (and even outside).  We would not want to paint
us into the kind of corner that I view Guile in, being absolutely
dependent on one person to maintain their code developed and contributed
without a perspective of others joining or continuing the work.

We want to avoid the wasted time of someone picking up the baton later
and trying for months to move the code into the obvious direction, only
to finally fail at the point that the person previously working on the
code circumnavigated with good reason.

Conflict resolution on the mailing list is a mostly manual process, and
as opposed to arguing with a computer until it accepts the results of a
series of imperfect attempts, human enthusiasm and patience is not an
unexhaustible resource.  So a lack of acumen cannot really be offset by
sufficient tenacity, as opposed to working with computers.

It's good to keep this in mind and try focusing on figuring out the
differences one is having with others sufficiently so that one feels
confident making progress towards a resolution with each communication.

This thread is more or less inviting outside opinion, and it ended up
more in a discussion about trust than content because regarding the
content, the knowledge is not all that widely distributed.

Now with regard to conflict resolution, I feel a bit like a celibate
person feeling compelled into giving marriage advice.  I cannot do much
more than express my gratitude that I see people willing to work on
addressing one another's concerns and wish them success doing it without
wasting unnecessary amounts of their energy.

Sorry for that heap of platitudes in lieu of an opinion.

-- 
David Kastrup