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Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:13:49 +0000
From: Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
[...]
Anyhow.. if there is some patch / fix you're referring to specifically,
ping it back up and someone might take an interest. I'll acknowledge
that we (gEDA developers) are collectively very bad at dealing with
contributions!
Things get ignored because we get busy and have other commitments. We
can obviously do better.
If fixes weren't "liked", we would probably have given a valid reason or
suggested a better alternative. A balance has to be struck between
accepting all patches quickly to encourage contribution, and reviewing
their design implications and code quality.
Regards,
--
Peter Clifton
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 14:18:06 +0100
From: Markus Hitter <mah@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
[...]
The unfortunate thing about such commodity issues is, some people
built up a somewhat unfriendly attitude against any code changes at
all. Perhaps because each code change sends the unseen, implicit
message to the original author: "you were wrong or could have done
better". Another, often seen attitude is "it works for me, so any
change can do nothing but harm".
Please get over such feelings. Nobody sits down and hacks away hours
and days just to point a finger to anyone. Much less they try to harm
or hobble anybody.
It's a totally normal affair in evolution to find improvements later
in time, and _that's_ the reason why programmers start submitting
patches: improve something based on previous art. So any patch should
give you the feeling: "my code was great, because others could
improve on it" and "the sum of both works wouldn't exist without my
original".
Markus
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 17:24:23 +0100
From: Markus Hitter <mah@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: gEDA-user: Random thoughts on the future interface of PCB
Am 06.12.2010 um 16:32 schrieb Stefan Salewski:
Sometimes there are some good reasons against code changes:
- huge increase in complexity for minimal gain. gcc 4.x may be an
example for this -- for some architectures there was not much gain
from
3.x, for microcontrollers there was some regression.
- sometimes the basic design of software is so bad (spagetti code)
that
each modification will introduce bugs.
- with changes the code will not work any more with old hardware or
libraries or architectures.
- porting to other languages or hardware can become harder
- licensing may be another issue, BSD/GNU/APACHE...
At best, these are reasons to ask the commiter to review his code to
match additional criteria. How would he know what traditinal gEDA
developers consider to be well formatted code, a good strategy of
conditionals, or what they consider to be a "huge increase"? In the
two months I'm on this list I've almost never seen such such a
request for matching additional criteria, despite of lots of no-no
criticism.
Even if the commiter doesn't want to review his work for whatever
reason - likely he will, as he wants to see his code in the main
trunk - there's always the chance somebody can learn from this, as it
solves a particular problem.
Markus
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/
Agreed, and I had a similar experience. I was hoping to get a review or
just some comments on a couple of patches I submitted (3114991, 3117075).
Now I can understand that it was probably in an off beat area and not the
topic du jour, so I went ahead and posted it to the patches tracker. No
comments there either, and I went to some effort to comment my code well,
tried to match the formatting as best I could, and even commented the
hunks in the patch set.
I also contacted Stuart Brorson directly and while he said he would look
at the patches he also said:
"As you might imagine, I'm busy with a number of other projects, so I
haven't had much time to devote to gEDA for a long time."
I think a lot of would be contributors are inspired to make improvements
but get stymied when their first offering falls on deaf ears. I know there
has to be a balance here, but I feel that there should always be someone
in the dev group that can take the time to respond and give some
constructive feedback.
Just my 2c,
Clif
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