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

From: Philippe Vaucher <philippe.vaucher@gmail.com>
Date: May 14, 2014, 13:13 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGK7Mr6XTxpeJLSqL8PZMS8w+YCqxLrC5wX-dg4BdEaW3QAYTA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <87egzwtthf.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>

Show 6 quoted lines

>> 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.

No, what I'm saying is that most non-trivial patches go through a review process involving human interactions. It is very hard to produce a very good non-trivial patch without going through human interactions, just because someone might ask a question about your patch. To be honest I'm not interested in fighting over this so let's agree to disagree.

Show 10 quoted lines

>> 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?

I'm sorry that my words aren't clear enough for you to infer the point I'm trying to make. Let's try something simpler: what I was saying is that bad behavior will get you into trouble when contributing (and thus it's important to behave nicely), where Felipe usualy says bad behavior is irrelevant because only truth/quality is important.

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

Yes it's unfortunate. The amount of talent in our societies that is wasted because of communication problems is probably quite high. I didn't find a way around "being social" in any human based community yet, but if you have an idea please share. The only way I can see working is that for someone to act as a mediator between the grumpy contributor and the community, but the role of this person is not very pleasant. That or maybe have merges done by some kind of robot with some AI about patch quality, but I doubt it is technically feasible yet.

Philippe