Re: [PATCH 0/4] remote-hg: more improvements

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: May 14, 2014, 12:50 UTC
Message-ID: <87egzwtthf.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAGK7Mr4N5L+jRE0ykBHvopgGv1x4iNXAK+_94R5KhBxHHqMYmA@mail.gmail.com>

Philippe Vaucher <philippe.vaucher@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

>> Basically you have to write in a manner "if a seedy stranger gave me
>> that code on a street corner, I would have no problem checking it
>> in".  In practice, the shortcuts offering themselves through civil
>> behavior and mutual trust get a lot more work done.
>
> My point was more that it's very hard to produce high quality commits
> without social interaction with others explaining what you missed,
> stuffs you overlooked, etc.

You are overgeneralizing. You are assuming that it's easier for everybody to interact with humans rather than the Tao of Computing.

> And there B issues quickly isolate you.

Unless you were isolated to start with.

> Anyway, I think we are speaking about different things. All I'm saying
> is that humans are social creatures and that thinking you can
> contribute to projects ran by humans without according a high
> importance to social behaviors (like Felipe thinks) is not possible.

You are assuming that "according a high importance to social behaviors" is all that it takes for anybody. Do you tell the beggar on the next street corner that "according a high importance to earning millions" would be all that would be necessary for him to afford anything to drink that he'd like?

> Threads like this are proof that while technical quality might be
> important for the short term, social behaviors is impossible to ignore
> in the long term.

Not really.

> Both are very important to be an appreciated contributor, or to
> contribute at all in the long term.

The one thing where social behavior comes in is noticing who tends to be running free software projects.

There is the mythical "scratching one's itch" theory, but it does not fit the bill. Those people who invest enough time into a project's progress to make a fundamental difference tend to do it at the cost of not having any worthwhile amount of time left actually _using_ the product.

People mainly working on music software create very little music themselves, people mainly working on text processing software do not write many texts themselves, people writing high-performance operating systems have very little use for high-performance operating systems themselves.

All of this might have started at one time as scratching their own itch, but once their contributions become significant, it's almost always the itches of others they are scratching, and continue to scratch, feeling responsible for them due to the skills they have been not as much blessed or cursed but entrusted with.

And programming and social skills tend to be packaged separately. So not everybody is gifted with being able to contribute _gracefully_.

-- 
David Kastrup