Re: GOP-PROP 2: mentors and Frogs - probably decision

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 04:06:17PM +0200, Jan Warchoł wrote:
> Problem 1: a Frog tries to modify wind diagrams code and experiences
> some difficulties.  (S)he sends an e-mail to -devel, but gets no
> answers because developer X (who wrote that code) overlooked his/her
> e-mail, and noone else knows the answer.
> Solution: a list of developers with "specializations", for example:

No.  I absolutely reject any solution which lays any kind of
obligation (implied or explict) on people.  See the second
paragraph of "rationale":
http://lilypond.org/~graham/gop/gop_2.html
I'm very serious about quitting lilypond immediately if I'm under
any obligation to do anything.


I *encourage* developers to review patches, I *encourage* them to
voluntarily offer to mentor people (and thereby accept some
resposibilities as long as they are officially a mentor) -- but we
should not *expect* developers to do anything simply because they
wrote the code in the first place.

The farthest I'm willing to go towards *expecting* developers to
do anything is that I expect them to complain about a patch when
it's in the official 48-hour countdown.  If they don't like the
patch after it's pushed, then of course we'll try to fix things,
but I expect the discussion to begin with "oops, there's a problem
XYZ that we didn't notice" instead of "you shouldn't have pushed
this because of problem XYZ".

> Problem 2: an Enthusiastic User writes to -devel: "it would be great
> if Lily supported foobar!". Graham replies: "sure, add it yourself."
> and nothing else happens. Graham is right, but user gets discouraged.

Is that a problem?  :)

> Solution: Graham (or anyone else) tells Enthusiastic User: "sure, add
> it yourself. You may ask X for some clues - he is experienced with
> foobaz, so he may be able to help you with foobar"

Absolutely not; see earlier point about not making demands on
developers.

> or "sure, add it yourself. If you have trouble, search our list
> of developers <link> for people who are familiar with foo-issues
> and may give you some clues."

That's really just the previous point.


I'm quite willing to say "sure, add it yourself.  Please contact
Janek for help getting started".  But it would be more positive if
you contacted him directly -- I'm quite willing to ignore+delete
any emails saying "it would be great if...".  IMO, giving no
response at all is worse than giving a "do it yourself" response,
but if you're offering to help people get started, then I don't
need to say anything at all!

Cheers,
- Graham