Re: Helping on Git development

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 15, 2011, 00:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20110915000851.GA6238@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vd3f2snox.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 04:34:38PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > Is there such a thing as enough coders? :)
> 
> Ever heard of the Mythical Man-Month ;-)?

I thought git was a silver bullet. :)

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> I was simply saying that there already are many people who scratch his
> own real itch, and we are short of the bandwidth to review them all.
> It would not help the project at all to add more people who scratch
> some random non-itches that nobody is actually interested in (e.g. an
> entry in an unmaintained "bug tracker" that may list irrelevant and
> stale non issues).

Yeah, that may be. But I don't look at it as "we have enough itch-scratchers, so we don't need more". I see it as survival of the fittest. You may post a patch series that needs a lot of help, but nobody else cares, and it dies off. Or your series may be interesting enough that it draws attention, to the detriment of somebody else's series (which may take longer to get reviewed and merged). But natural selection only works if we have a diverse population to select from.

The downside, of course, is that somebody may end up wasting time going down a fruitless road. But for a new contributor, hopefully they learn something in the process.

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> >   2. Read the list. People will report bugs. Try reproducing them,
> [...]
> 
> Yes. In the earlier steps in the above, you may find out that the
> report was actually not a bug at all (e.g. old issue that has long
> been fixed, pebcak, or wrong expectation), but even in such a case,
> reporting your finding would help others.

Very much agreed. I think big organizations like mozilla have people who do nothing but bug triage. We are not that big, but it has proven to be one area that is easy to break out and distribute to other people.

-Peff