Re: Helping on Git development

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 14, 2011, 23:34 UTC
Message-ID: <7vd3f2snox.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110914231427.GA5611@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

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> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:29:28AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> As to contributing to the project, right now, I think we have enough
>> people who want to write code and documentation for Git, but what we lack
>> are bandwidth to (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list):
>
> Is there such a thing as enough coders? :)

Ever heard of the Mythical Man-Month ;-)?

I thought it was clear from my message but probably I wasn't clear enough, so let's make it clear. I didn't mean to ay "we have enough -- we need no more -- we reject new applicants".

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).

Show 8 quoted lines

>   2. Read the list. People will report bugs. Try reproducing them,
>      bisecting them, creating minimal test cases, narrowing the issues
>      down to certain configurations or a certain bit of code, etc.
>      Sometimes that will lead you to propose a solution. Sometimes
>      you'll just add to the discussion, and then somebody with more
>      familiarity can pick up the topic from there. But you'll have
>      helped them by doing some of the work, and you'll have learned more
>      about how git works.

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.