Re: RFC on MR 1368

[Jean Abou Samra]

This discussion isn't exactly putting Jonas in a comfortable
situation, which I empathize with, and I'm trying not to add
to that. I do want to raise a few points.


Le 25/05/2022 à 19:05, Jonas Hahnfeld via Discussions on LilyPond 
development a écrit :
> From the MR:
> > > I equally object to any contribution being merged "because the author knows what 
> > > he's doing".
> For context, this was in response to "I hope that you can trust me,
> being the FreeType maintainer since 20 years, on font issues." which,
> during code review, makes it far too easy to dismiss arguments without
> the needed explanations for "mere mortals".



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.



[Carl]
> I think it is important for us to recognize that Jonas has not been asking
> for authority to reject a patch.  He has been expressing technical concerns
> about the selected architecture.  Code review should allow for this kind of
> expression in all cases.
>
> I hope we can recognize that both Werner and Jonas are trying to improve
> LilyPond.  And in fact, Werner has indicated that he needs to make changes
> in response to Jonas's questions.


+1


All the best,
Jean