Re: Lilypond patchy and other Lilypond problems

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 11:14:23AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > Then we'll have hard numbers on which developers are abusing the
>> > process.  I mean, sure, we all know whose patches tend to be great
>> > and whose patches tend to be problematic... but a completely
>> > automated, objective approach would remove any personal bias.
>> 
>> And those who generated more negative karma with their work than the
>> average horse in the stables near our house will get banished from
>> contributing for two weeks?
>
> No; I'm expecting the Hawthorne effect to take care of it.
>
>> Get real.  When the cure is worse than the symptom, leave it alone.
>
> Well, that would be the question.  If programmers know that there
> will be a record of any bad patch submissions, would they be less
> likely to contribute?  Or would they be more likely to check their
> work before submitting it?
>
> I'm obviously hoping for the latter, but I suppose that the former
> is still a logical possibility.

It's small fry.  The really bad things are those that are prodded until
they pass the tests rather than the committer's level of understanding.
And those would create positive Karma points.  In fact, if you have to
do half a dozen of iterations before getting things actually right on
the somewhat more than superficial level provided by our tests, you'll
have gained lots of good Karma on the road.

We need more human feedback.

-- 
David Kastrup