Re: development process

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 08:59:33PM -0500, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> > LilyPond has had a lot of patches get dropped because
> > nobody feels comfortable reviewing / shepherding them.
> 
> Seems to me like one solution to that problem might be a subtle
> variant on extreme programming: All features/fixes must be
> signed out for "patch-ing" by two developers, at least one of
> which has committed to and is capable of being the mentor
> (shepherding/reviewing).

If LilyPond development were a job (which it isn't), and I was the
manager/boss (which I'm not), then I would be totally on board
with ordering experienced developers to spend 20%-30% of their
time mentoring.  This "pair programming" solution is one such
version.

But LilyPond isn't a job.  It's a volunteer effort, and people are
free to donate their time (or not) as they see fit.

Let's pick one person: Han-Wen.  He's said that he has a few hours
to spend on LilyPond on Friday afternoon.  Would he prefer to work
on resolving comments about his latest patch on scheme internals
(or whatever he's working on) ?  Or would he prefer to spend time
communicating with his "paired" developer, who's excited about the
shape of the alto clef and wants to work on that instead?

I can't answer that question, and neither can you.  Han-Wen is the
only person who can decide how he'd like to spend his time.


I would *love* to see more developers collaborating together.  But
if the current landscape is anything like it was from 2000 - 2012,
then I fear that any policy which *required* such collaboration
would likely lead to a collapse of development effort.

My $0.02: developers can already form pairs, or take newcomers
under their wing, or do any number of activities that involve
collaborating off-list.  I tried to set up "programming mentoring"
at least twice, and it always fizzled out.

If there's more developers interested in mentoring, and if they
can get a real community of mentoring going for a few months,
*then* I think it might be worth formalizing such arrangements in
policy.  But unless / until that happens, I would be reluctant to
have a policy that required collaboration which we don't see
happening already.


Thought experiment: suppose that a complete newcomer posts to the
email list tomorrow, saying that he was interested in working on
    bug #5542 cross-staff slur hides text in eps backend
(I picked randomly).

Would anybody jump up and say "great!  Let me help you get
started.  I'll work on this with you!"?  Or would there be silence
for a few days?

If you say "I expect that a developer (but not me) would step
forward and offer to mentor him"... then you would be expected
extra volunteer effort from developers.

Cheers,
- Graham