Re: GOP-PROP 10: scheme indentation

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 10:23:00AM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Graham Percival writes:
> 
> > Gee, I wonder why we haven't seen any more patches from that new
> > contributor?
> > </sarcasm>
> 
> This looks like a contributor who needs some guidance.

Yes.

> It should suffice to say: please fix
> indentation (there is enough other code to spot the errors) and possibly
> say we use GNU style.  Luckily we can now say: run fixcc.

There is nothing "lucky" about that; we spent somewhere between 20
to 40 developer-hours producing the current fixcc.  Note that
before spending that time, we could *not* say "use GNU style" or
"use emacs", since our code did not follow either of those styles
(and running fixcc on certain files actually caused them to fail
to compile!).

I think this was a decent trade-off.  Of course it would have been
nice if we could have done it in "only" 10 hours of
developer-time, but I'm not surprised it took as long as it did,
and at least it's done now.  But don't call it "lucky"; a number
of people worked very hard to make it possible.


> However, it seems that we lack a good policy on when to just apply a
> patch from a new contributor, fix minor nits, apply it, and email them
> the result: "Thanks for your patch, I have applied it with small
> modifications/indentation nits, see below."
>
> While you should possibly not be doing that more than 2 or 3 times, this
> is a very efficient way of integrating patches and communicating what
> kind of code we expect.

Yes; the problem is a lack of mentors.  I have done this many
times for documentation patches when I was mentoring new doc
writers.

*shrug*

It's not as though I haven't been advertising and pleading
developers to mentor new contributors.  As a group, we are
collectively not very interested in giving personal help to new
contributors.  At this point, I think the only sensible thing is
to accept that this is the way we are, and plan our other policies
around that.

Related: "high context" vs. "low context" cultures in open source,
from one of the Mozilla people.
http://stormyscorner.com/2011/09/does-open-source-exclude-high-context-cultures.html

We are almost exclusively "low context" culture in lilypond.  I
invested a lot of time trying to create a "high" (or at least
"medium context") culture during the Grand Documentation Project,
but we all know how that ended up.

At this point, I think we simply need to accept that lilypond
development is a fairly individual, "low context" culture, and
gear our policies towards that.  And also accept that we'll have
far fewer contributors than we could have.

Cheers,
- Graham