patchDocumentation/CommunityGuidelines

I've tried to write down a bare minimum, without restating the obvious.

0. You do not take offense, no matter what.  If someone attacks you
irrationally, you do not respond.  This is a public mailing list, and
we are all rational people: the attacker has already humiliated
herself in public, and everyone can see that.

1. You do not take sides or vote.  Do not post emails under the
pretext of agreement: repeating what has already been said does not
strengthen the argument.  Post only if you have something unique to
add to the discussion.

2. You stop pointing fingers.  Every heated discussion requires more
than one participant, and a flamewar requires many participants.  If
you participate, you have implicitly agreed to share the blame for
whatever happens on the thread.  People can judge for themselves who
is to blame.

3. Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.  The ones that are most
common on this list: strawman, ad hominem, burden of proof, false
cause, the texas sharpshooter, and appeal to authority.

4. Lead by example.  If you do not like how someone presents
themselves on the list, you counter it by presenting yourself nicely
on the list.  Others will follow your example, making that person's
behavior the minority.  It is far more powerful than explicitly
stating what is "acceptable" behavior and what is not.

5. We are a community of programmers, and we are here to collaborate
on code.  The argument that leads to higher efficiency and better code
has an automatic advantage over the argument that doesn't.

If someone breaks one of these rules, there's a very simple way to communicate this to them: you don't respond to their email. Optionally, respond to their email off-list calmly explaining what went wrong.

Le 10/06/2013 15:28, Ramkumar Ramachandra a écrit :

"Herself"? Typo I guess :)

Célestin Matte <celestin.matte@ensimag.fr> writes:

Not necessarily. It's quite common in english to use "she" when the gender is not known.

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 04:04:29PM +0200,  Matthieu Moy wrote:

Could you please use "themself" instead?

"Robin H. Johnson" <robbat2@gentoo.org> writes:

I think "himself or herself" is the politically correct form ;-)

But more seriously.

The intent behind the document might be a noble one, but I am afraid that the text is too broad and vague and does not address the real issue to be of practical use.

Taking one bullet point from the top for example:

    0. You do not take offense, no matter what.  If someone attacks
    you irrationally, you do not respond.  This is a public mailing
    list, and we are all rational people: the attacker has already
    humiliated herself in public, and everyone can see that.

What does saying "we are all rational people" help when "the attacker" poses a risk to destroy the community? What does "we are all rational people" even mean in this sentence?

It does not address the real cause of flamewars---why do rational people feel the need to respond when an irrational comment is made, e.g. when a reasonable review comments were responded not with either "Yeah, you are right, thanks." or "Not really, because you missed this case, I think..." but with nitpicks with immaterial details or repetition without justification that takes account that the reviewer is in disagreement and there must be some reason behind it, i.e. a poisonous behaviour?

I suspect it mostly has to do with the desire to make sure that bystanders do not get an impression that the one who speaks last gives the conclusion to the discussion, so stating "The attacker being the one who speaks last in the discussion does not mean the conclusion is his." explicitly might be one way to make it more practically useful by alleviating the urge to respond, instead of saying "no matter what".

I dunno.

Junio C Hamano wrote:

[...]

Actually my motivation is worse than that in at least one of the cases I am assuming Ram is referring to.

I don't think most bystanders would misunderstand if I let a certain person alone instead of responding and saying "You are being unproductive. Please stop." But that certain person seems to misunderstand, whether I say that or not. So when I lose patience I say so, knowing that it will spark a discussion with others, knowing that that discussion needs to happen and that if the problem is not addressed I will continue to lose motivation for regular work on-list.

Is that an instance of taking offense and letting emotion overtake reason? Is that against the rules?

Jonathan

Jonathan Nieder wrote:

The problem needs to be addressed, Jonathan. Which is precisely why I wrote this patch: to calmly and rationally discuss the issue, and dampen the chances of repetition. You do not do it by losing your patience, becoming emotional, and fueling a large ongoing fire. Prolonging fires do not help prevent them from recurring, as evidenced by previous fires; this is because there is no takeaway from a fire. All that's left are a few shreds and ashes. From this very fire, we gained NOTHING, and lost Duy.

It is absolutely imperative to keep all our contributors productive, and maximize output. If there is something troubling you, this is the right thread to speak on.

On 06/10/2013 03:45 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote: [...]

Why?

A useful "product" with a maintainable code base are what seems to be more important to a successful open source effort.

A Large Angry SCM

A Large Angry SCM wrote:

Doesn't a successful open source effort (with a good review process, which we already have) imply a maintainable product with lots of users? What am I missing, and what change do you propose?

On 06/10/2013 04:56 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

It's not about keeping all of the contributers productive or maximizing output. It's about the result being useful.

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Science shows that humans are in fact, not rational people. It's simply one of our countless limitations. We acknowledge we have physical limitations, but we forget our mental limitations.

We should aim to be rational people, yes, but we are not.

First of all, you should not refer to it as "poisonous behavior". Maybe you think it's poisonous, maybe everyone else in the mailing list agrees it's poisonous, but talk doesn't make things real, otherwise there were a lot of real witches in the past.

You should refer to it as 'what could be considered poisonous behavior'. That is accurate.

Calling it "poisonous behavior" at best can be considered a logical fallacy, and at worst could even be described as a poisonous comment itself.

I think we all know at some level why flame war arise, as XKCD makes it comically succinct[1].

If somebody wants to argue for the sake of arguing, they should go to some forum, or reddit, or something else other than the mailing list.

In the mailing list you should avoid flamewars. If you have identified a flamewar, don't poke it, and ask for others to do the same; don't throw lumber unto the flames.

I know you worry that somebody is wrong on the Internet, and you worry that somebody else might read that, and think the person that is wrong is actually right. But you cannot fix that. Move on. If the reader is smart, they'll understand the signal "Don't throw lumber unto the flames." followed by silence from other members of the community.

Trying to "correct" somebody often sends the wrong signal; you validate the other person's point of view as something worth arguing about. If you truly think a flamewar is taking place, resist your urge to participate in it, and mute it.

Maybe it's not really flamewar, and something important is being discussed, but you should leave the people that do not think a flamewar is taking place to argue with each other, and stay out of that. If you think it's a flamewar, and you comment in it, you are making it worst, and perhaps turning it into a real flamewar if it wasn't.

In general; do not participate in a flamewar. Period.

[1] http://xkcd.com/386/

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Drafting something like this is shit work, which explains why nobody has attempted it yet. I have no intent of collecting feedback and doing iterations: it's going to be an extraordinarily hard and boring task; _much_ worse than any technical documentation.

Let me be clear that I have no hopes of landing this "patch": I just wanted to create a calm and rational atmosphere for people to discuss the problem, in the hopes of minimizing the chances of large frequent fires. If you think we should put _something_ in our tree, I suggest dumping a few raw emails from this thread into contrib/CommunityGuidelines/ (or something).

I intended it as a way to reassure everyone that we will make unbiased, rational judgements to the extent possible.

There is no great truth about some hidden "real cause" to be found. For instance, in the one we just had, I would argue that it "started" with your non-patch "administriva" email with a huge number of people marked in the initial CC. Disaster waiting to happen, if you ask me. I'm not "blaming" you, but the lesson to be learnt is: avoid non-patch emails, and CC conservatively; if you want to discuss some changes, send a patch. That would explain why this very email is disguised as a "[PATCH]", with exactly one person in the initial CC.

In short, the "reason" is a complex mix of various people's interactions under the current circumstances. Fires happen, and that is a fact; we can only look for common patterns and attempt to avoid fires by documenting these patterns as violations. Which is exactly what I have done (or attempted to do).

That is one pattern, but by no means the only one or even the "most important" one. I thought 0 was a nice generalization.

On 06/10/2013 03:28 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

Thank you for drafting a proposed CommunityGuidelines document; I think such a document would be helpful. But I don't like the overall flavor of your proposal; frankly, it sounds to me more like

Documentation/GuidelinesForCommunityToBendOverBackwardsToLiveWithFCsProvocations

and I don't think that is healthy.

This is secondary to the more important rule, "do not attack other people on the mailing list". Not taking offense is at best a(n important) fallback position for those regrettable occasions when somebody else has already violated the primary guideline.

Here your wording "every heated discussion requires more than one participant" seems to put more of the blame for heated discussions on participants 2..N and give a pass to participant number one.

I think putting a rule like this in CommunityGuidelines puts too much weight on it. In my recollection, pointing out other people's supposed logical fallacies is far more often used on this list as a nitpicking diversionary tactic that usually leads a conversation *further* away from the real issues. I think it would be a mistake to encourage such formal and stylized argument on the ML.

Leading by example is a great approach, and has the effect that you describe on the majority of people. But I also think it would be helpful for the community to agree on a few very minimum standards of behavior that we insist on, and to call people out (preferably in a private email) if they fall short of these standards.

I would prefer a community standards document that looks more like this:

* Treat other community members with courteousness and respect.

* Conduct disagreements on a technical, not a personal, level.  It is
unacceptable to attack another community member personally, even by
insinuation.

* Keep in mind that email is a medium prone to misunderstandings, and
that many mailing list participants do not speak English as their first
language.  Interpret other people's emails charitably.  If you are not
sure that you understand, ask for clarification.  Assume good intentions
on the part of others, and do not attribute technical disagreements to
ulterior motives.  Choose your words carefully to help other people
avoid misinterpreting them, and avoid hyperbole.

* Strive to keep the mailing list a forum for effective collaboration.
Only post if you have something worthwhile to add to the discussion.  Be
concise and do not repeat what has already been said.  Code reviews,
contributions of patches, and concrete data such as bug reports are far
preferable to philosophizing, vague suggestions, and whining.  Avoid
bikeshedding and do not participate in flame wars.  Avoid revisiting
settled debates unless the facts have changed.

* Accept reviewers' comments gratefully and take them very seriously.
Show that you appreciate the help by giving the reviewer the benefit of
the doubt.  If, after careful consideration, you find that you cannot
agree with a reviewer's suggestion, explain your reasoning carefully
without taking or giving offense, and seek compromise.

* When reviewing other peoples' code, be tactful and constructive.  Set
high expectations, but do what you can to help the submitter achieve
them.  Don't demand changes based only on your personal preferences.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

* Be welcoming to new community participants.  Help them get oriented,
and be patient with their questions.  Gently introduce them to our
community standards, above all by setting a good example yourself.

* It is not OK to use these guidelines as a stick with which to beat
supposed violators.  However, if you genuinely feel that another
community member is routinely behaving in ways that are detrimental to
the community, it might help to calmly express your concerns to that
person, preferably in a private email, and naming concrete and specific
incidents rather than broad generalizations.

Michael

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

The LKML would disagree with you, as this draft is rather similar to what they do. Have you ever heard the phrase "don't feed the troll"? Well, it's every similar.

This also happens in any civilized modern society. Maybe you don't agree with the Tea Party, or some other political group, but you deport them? Do you squash their protests? No. You let them say what they need to say, and you ignore them.

It's best for you, and it's best for the community. Ignore them and move on.

Yes but you can't control what other people do, only what you do. Presumably you think you are not going to violate any of the other rules, so it's all the more important that you do follow this one, because that's the one *you* are possibly going to need to remember.

But by you I really me "we", because we all think we are not going to violate the other rules. We all think we don't commit logical fallacies, we all think our comments are right, productive, rational, and sensible.

Of course that's not the case, what you think is a perfectly reasonable comment, somebody else might consider offensive. In fact, somebody is bound to find something offensive, so when that someone happens to be you, take a deep breath, and don't.

Which might actually be the case. If a drunk punches you in the face, and you fight back. Who do you think the police is going to find guilty of brawling?

If you are not going to argue on the basis of logic and reason, what are you going to argue on the basis of?

Being logical and reasonable is not finicky, it's a necessity. At least if you want to stay close to the real world.

I disagree. Respect should be earned.

Moreover, tolerance is what is needed, respect is not. You should be tolerant, even to the people who don't respect you.

I believe this is obvious and hardly worth mentioning. But on the other hand, once could say I have been a victim of personal attacks, not on a technical level. Perhaps it is worth mentioning.

I agree, but I think my wording of assuming good faith is better.

Mostly agree, but the flamewar part needs to be emphasized and in its own point.

Agreed. But I would say 'consider compromise'; often a compromise is in the project's best interest, but not always.

But it's missing the guideline for the reviewer.

* Accept comments on your reviews gracefully. If the original patch
submitter doesn't agree with your review, don't take offense. Don't
assume the submitter has to automatically modify the patches according
to your comments, or even necessarily seek a compromise. The submitter
is entitled to his opinion, and so are you. Also, remember that each
person has their own priorities in life, and it might take time before
the submitter has time to implement the changes, if ever. The changes
you request might be beyond the time the submitter is willing to
spend, and it's OK for him to decide to drop the patches as a result.
You can help by picking the patches yourself in those situations.

Very good. It's good to remember these are guidelines, not by-laws. One should not focus on the transgressions of others, for which there's no defined punishment, but rather; on what one can do oneself.

Michael Haggerty wrote:

It has nothing to do with Felipe. I've merely documented repeating patterns in fire threads as violations, in an attempt to avoid fires. I have not worked forward from axioms to derive "transcendentally desirable behavior", but rather backwards from a disaster to derive "patterns that have been shown to lead to large fires". Why? Because it's easier to derive unambiguous statements using my approach; as I will show shortly, there are various problems with your arguments.

What gives you the impression that I documented everyone else's violations, but not Felipe's? ;)

The problem with your guideline is that you now need to define some sort of objective basis to determine whether or not someone attacks. What is this transcendental notion of "attack"? I say something, and you take offense, while someone else does not. Have I or have I not attacked you? One possible solution to this dilemma is to use "majority opinion" as a basis. This is a very dangerous road to go down, as fringe behaviors will keep getting eliminated until we're left with a bunch of yes-men on the list. In other words, an extremely suffocating atmosphere.

My guideline does not suffer from this problem. It only requires you to believe that you were personally offended, and act accordingly. Whether or not you were justified in being offended is nobody's business.

I'm not going to comment on the issue of wording, since I've already made it clear that this "patch" is not for inclusion.

It is unclear who "Participant #1" is, but I'm not giving anyone a pass; everyone must share the blame.

The guidelines serve as a means of educating people on the list about how they can avoid fuelling fires, not for literally quoting and beating up violators. As I have already stated in the final paragraph, there needs to be no consensus on whether or not a rule has been violated: everyone can judge that for themselves.

Let's see what your guidelines look like.

Summary: be a "nice" person, said in a very gentle way.  How is it
better than the documents various internet communities have spent
years writing and perfecting? [1]

[1]: http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 5:45 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

In a parallel with law, there is no concept of "justly" offended, precisely because there is no way to determine what that even means. People get offended by all sorts of things.

What's wrong with being offended? http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl2w7q_easily-offended-then-watch-this_fun

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

It has become clear, also in discussion on IRC, that your preferred approach is to fight the fires, attempting to extinguish flames as they happen.

My approach -- and in my perception also that preferred by most of the regulars who have spoken in this whole mess -- is that since there is a fire hazard, it would be more effective firefighting to just remove the hazard, thus preventing future fires.

I infer that in your view, there is an inalienable right for the fire hazard to remain part of the community that you are not willing to give up. I for one no longer have such qualms in this instance.

Thomas Rast wrote:

Incorrect. I am interested in minimizing occurrences, which is why I started this thread: to calmly and rationally discuss how to achieve that. I have listed many concrete proposals, and justified them with reason.

Presumably, Felipe is the "fire hazard" that we are talking about, and nobody else is to blame. He must be "removed" to prevent future fires. This is the "perception of the regulars", correct?

Then why haven't you removed him yet? What are you waiting for? You don't need my "approval".

Is it because you have realized deep down that you have absolutely no rational argument, and are arguing with an ill-formed "majority opinion"? I have words, you have words. Why are you incapable of using your words to counter my arguments rationally?Are you so blind that you cannot see the consequences of acting without reason? Tomorrow the majority opinion will dictate that I am a fire hazard and must be removed. Soon, anybody who disagrees with the majority opinion will be removed, and the community will be reduced to a handful of circlejerking yes-men. The git project will die a sad death. And the blood will be on your hands.

Incorrect. There is no "transcendental inalienable right" that dictates that "fire hazards" must remain part of the community. I never made such an irrational argument. I already gave you the example of the survivors on the boat with limited food/water on IRC: it is you who stupidly refused to throw anyone overboard, killing all the survivors; I am the one who said that I would get them to draw sticks to "fairly choose" who to throw overboard, maximizing the chances of survival of the others. I am making a pragmatic argument, based on what is best for the community; not some stuck-up idealistic bullshit. Further, I tried to help you think through the justice problem, by recommending an accessible course. You have either not gone through it, or have gone through it and learnt nothing.

What should I "give up"?  My rationality?

Man up, and stop hiding being the veils of "majority opinion". _Your_ opinion is that Felipe must be removed from the list without reason. Don't talk for the others. I'm sick of you "supporting" another person's opinion. Stand up and speak for yourself; leave Haggerty out of it.

You have embarrassed yourself and the entire git community today.

On 06/11/2013 03:40 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

Ram, you are insulting Thomas the human being rather than addressing his points. Please stop.

It is not disagreement that is causing problems; it is the inflammatory tone of the discussion. Civil and constructive disagreement is completely welcome here. But hurtful and offensive discussion is not, even if it is in support of the "party line" (haha as if there were such a thing).

And yes, I know that the word "offensive" is subjective, but for the sake of this discussion let's take it to mean "offensive to the vast majority of a community". Not "controversial", not "contrarian", not even "stupid"; I don't think anybody is proposing to prohibit dissent or stupidity. But there is no reason for discussion that is gratuitously aggressive, insulting, or derogatory; such discussion is what I mean by "offensive".

Your idea that you can assign Thomas "homework" in ethics and call him stupid for coming to a different conclusion than you is presumptuous in the extreme.

This is also presumptuous, not to mention extremely ironic. In my opinion Thomas's email was calm and reasonable while yours is beyond the pale.

Ram, don't just take my opinion on this matter. At the risk of being presumptuous myself, I suggest that you show a copy of your email to somebody whom you know and respect in the real world, somebody who is not immersed in the Git community meltdown. For example, somebody like your mother or father, or a teacher whom you respect, or a member of clergy if you are so inclined. Ask that person's opinion about your email.

It is so easy to lose perspective in the Internet.

Michael

Hi,

Before going to your arguments, can you stop conveniently *ignoring* my argument and answer this questions?

When two children fight, who has the blame? The one that threw the first punch? Or the one that returned it?

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

How is Ram insulting Thomas? By implying that Thomas is a human being? That he is imperfect and is making a mistake?

My gosh! How offensive!

The difference between the two is totally and completely subjective, and only a despot would be conformable parting judgment about which is which.

Rule of the mob. How wise.

He didn't call him stupid, he said he was acting stupidly, big difference.

Of course it would be. In a witch hunt nobody sees what's wrong with burning the witch... until you become it.

It's fine for Thomas Rast to call me a fire hazard, which ironically is itself an inflammatory comment. But it's not OK for Ramkumar to say that Thomas is acting stupidly *in this particular instance*.

Double standards much?

I can offer my own perspective; I think Ramkumar's tone is not particularly useful, but to concentrate on *how* he is saying things, instead of *what* he is saying is an even bigger mistake, specially because it's *you* the one that is making it. You should concentrate on what *you* do, not what others do. Otherwise you will be forever frustrated.

You have chosen to ignore *all* of Ramkumar's arguments, and all your arguments can be summarized as "I don't like your tone", and by doing that, you have lost even more touch of the discussion than what you accused Ramkumar of doing.

You have even violated two your own guidelines:

* Conduct disagreements on a technical, not a personal, level.
* It is not OK to use these guidelines as a stick with which to beat
supposed violators.

You have also violated some of Ramkumar:

0. You do not take offense, no matter what.

In this particular case, you are taking offense by proxy, which might be even worst.

1. You do not take sides or vote.
2. You stop pointing fingers.

I would also suggest another guideline based on Paul Graham's guide How to Disagree[1].

* Do not respond to tone. Concentrate on *what* is being said, not
*how* it is being said. If the worst thing you can say about something
is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much. A "bad tone" is
highly subjective, and it's not really relevant in a discussion, it
matters whether the author is right or wrong. Is the author flippant,
but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. Keep your eye on the
ball.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

This is an exercise. I can easily be more tactful (as evidenced by other threads), but I'm choosing not to be. I want you to focus on the argument, and not the tone.

Michael Haggerty wrote:

He doesn't have a point! He makes the assumption that the "perception of the regulars" is that a "fire hazard" must be "removed" from the community. There are absolutely no rational arguments in his email, he violated virtually every rule that we were working towards, and he made an inflammatory comment by calling Felipe a "fire hazard". Yes I was particularly harsh, because Rast was particularly irrational. I did not "insult" him as a human being; I "criticized" his email which was completely devoid of reason.

In case you're wondering, this is what an ad hominem looks like:

You are studying a subject that requires extensive application of logic: combinatorial structures and algorithms at ETH Zurich. You live in a well-to-do progressive society. I live in this poor country called India, am much younger than you, and have studied nothing. Yet, you make the irrational argument, while I make the rational argument.

As you can clearly see, I focused on his argument; not on him.

Incorrect. The problem is that Rast is made an irrational argument, and that you are "supporting" him now. If you were "fair" you would have criticized Rast's inflammatory comment about classifying Felipe as a "fire hazard", without justification. But you didn't. _You_ are making my "tone" the subject of discussion now, and claim that I have been hurtful and offensive. My email was very much "constructive disagreement", in that I have laid out why one should not perform actions without reason; I even assigned him homework, because I _want_ him to understand justice and argue rationally. How could I have been more constructive?

I do not "support" Felipe, or "defend" him. I do not share his exact opinions, and often criticize him. I am fair in that I praise rational arguments, and criticize irrational arguments. I don't want to speak for him, but I believe that he gives me the same treatment, and I thank him for that.

I do not appreciate this ganging-up one bit. I'm one person arguing against an opaque "majority opinion" veil. For the last time, stop taking sides, and make a goddamn rational argument!

You have made the same argument that I criticized over and over again: "majority opinion". If you agree that tone is subjective, why are you trying to objectively criticize it by using majority opinion as the basis? You might not like a piece of artwork personally, and the majority of the git list might "agree" with you, but that does not mean you can authoritatively claim that the piece of art is junk. You have every right to dislike it personally, but that is an entirely different matter.

Incorrect. I used "stupid" to describe his solution to the survivors-in-the-boat problem. I gave him homework (and this is Harvard Justice, by the way), in an attempt to get him to think clearly and come up with less "stupid" solutions to similar problems. If you are defending throwing modern justice theories out the window, and replacing it with a crude irrational argument, I have nothing more to say.

Yes, I did exercise my freedom of expression. And yes, I was perfectly calm. Please do not suffocate me to death.

Let us get two simple things straightened out first:
1. Was Thomas being irrational or not?
2. Are you being fair or not?

They're yes-or-no questions. Hint: My "tone" has nothing to do with the answers.

I respect all of you on the Git list.  And yes, I have done what you
asked: I showed it to several friends of mine on IRC and in real life.
 They were not at all surprised: they know me to be a very polite,
gentle, and reasonable person.  My stern rational disagreement has
nothing to do with any of those things.

And yes, as Felipe pointed out: you entire email has complained about my "tone" and _completely_ ignored content.

On 06/11/2013 08:16 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

I stopped reading your email here. I've read enough tactless emails over the last few days, but to be asked to read an email that was *intentionally* written tactlessly is too detrimental to my quality of life.

In German there is an expression "Der Ton macht die Musik": "the tone makes the music", by which they mean that the *way* something is said is at least as important as what is said. The tone *is* an integral part of the message and (1) the writer will be much more effective by making the tone agree with the literal words of the message and (2) for this particular reader, the effort of accommodating writers who are unwilling to do so has become too exhausting.

I naively thought that I might be able to help calm the situation, but I have concluded that nothing I can say or do will have that effect. Therefore I bow out of this part of the conversation and hope either that it will fizzle out or that perhaps a deus ex machina will appear.

Michael

Michael Haggerty wrote:

I'm sorry, but the problem has no solution then.

The "problem" we are dealing with is irrational and/or out-of-tone emails. Unless you possess some mind-control mechanism that will get all contributors to write emails that conform to your standards, there is no solution. If you feel strongly that everyone must conform to your standards, you must "remove" the members that do not conform to that standard.

I have no desire to be suffocated to conform to your standard, so I'm ready to leave.

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

Actually there is.  Just ignore the troll.

In the past few days, I've learned to mostly skim mails from you and Felipe on this topic (and perhaps some other topics) just enough to see if there is anything worth reading and/or responding to in them, and have ignored most of them.

That gave me some time back to do the real work.

If you argue that we should not punish "people" but "bad behaviour", that is fine. The "From:" field, combined with the "Subject: " field, is often a pretty good indication to tell if a message is worth reading and/or responding to, so ignoring such messages and ignoring troll senders practically amount to the same thing.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 2:06 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Congratulations Junio. You have followed our drafted guidelines by choosing to lead by example how not to not propagate the violence, turn around, and take the high road.

After kicking your opponent in the groin.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Yeah, you are ignoring the arguments, what a surprise.

I know you don't care about reality, but you are committing the is-ought fallacy. You are describing the way things are, not the way things should be.

Yes, most people can't handle rational arguments, or truth, and need hypocrites to hide things from them. That's why politics is surrounded by people who never say the truth.. not really.

That doesn't mean that's the way things _ought_ to be, specially not the way *you* should act.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

Such excellent advice. Even if the advice is not taken literally, it is probably enough to just imagine how that person whom you respect would respond to the words in your emails. I am sure I do not do this enough in my own communications.

I just wanted to draw attention to this wonderful suggestion again. Sometimes it is necessary to take a step back when discussions get heated, to regain perspective.

-Brandon

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 07:10:11PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

He (and you) get "removed" when individuals who have decided the vast majority of their e-mails shed more heat than light, and so people decide that it's not worth reading their e-mails. I have persionally made this determination for both you and for Felipe; for you, your participation in this thread was what set the "bozo bit".

Now, I'm not a major developer for git, so my personal decision doesn't make a huge amount of difference.

But if people who *are* senior developers in the git community decide, on their own, that someone isn't worth listening to, there's the punishment has been inflicted, and this happens without banning someone from posting or removing them from the mailing list.

Please stop.

Regards,

							- Ted

Theodore Ts'o wrote:

Yes, I have already been punished by several people. As a result of my arguments on this thread, everyone will treat me like a troll in the future.

As a rational person, why have I inflicted this upon myself? To make a point about how increased tolerance is the way to reduce fires? No, it is not worth it. Either way, I have failed miserably: by being deliberately untactful, I have only aggravated the community.

I have no desire to constantly exhibit deviant behavior that offends a large majority.

Sorry.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 6:56 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

On what basis have you made that determination? Have you made that determination based on my contributions?

% git shortlog -n -s --no-merges --since '3 months ago'
   221	Felipe Contreras
    83	Junio C Hamano
    69	Jeff King
    62	Michael Haggerty
    48	Ramkumar Ramachandra
    35	Thomas Rast
    33	Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy
    32	John Keeping
    30	René Scharfe
    21	Kevin Bracey

Have you read each and every one of my 800 patches in the last three months? Plus all my replies?

Or have you made that determination based on the tiny subset of those that are controversial?

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:

You would make an excellent evil dictator.

A benevolent dictator like Linus Torvalds knows better, in the LKML "fire hazards" are not removed, they are ignored before any flames go up. This achieves the best of both worlds; if the person is truly vicious, nothing happens, but if there's something to it, a person that doesn't offend so easily might have a fruitful discussion, while the rest ignore the thread.

In a flamewar everyone is guilty. Apparently you never learned that "but he started it!" is not a defense worthy of an adult, hell, even most children know that.

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:

[Yes, I should let this thread die, but you are offering me too good a chance to pass up.]

It's funny that you would mention Linus, considering there's at least one instance on record where he broke almost every rule that Ram attempted to set out in the thread starter, calling you among other things a "fucking moron" and telling you to "go away".

  https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/4/12/434

In case our readers wonder why the flame war suddenly died out at a depth of about 19 replies, fear not, for the story continued:

  https://plus.google.com/108736516888538655285/posts/7QSVy8taWgC

And before you try to shoot that down, please make sure your argument also applies to the recurring situation of your repeatedly ignoring SubmittingPatches as far as commit messages go against explicit requests to stop that.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 10:41 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:

Yet, this "fire hazzard" was not removed, nor was there any threat of doing so at any point in the discussion.

You sure like your ad hominem arguments. Perhaps it would be wise to get the timeline right. The Google+ discussion you are pointing to happened *before* the thread ended, even Linus replied after that:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.ath9k.devel/8675

There's nothing to shoot down, you are not making any argument. You are doing nothing but throwing personal attacks.

If what you are suggesting is that we should do what they did in the LKML; they did *exactly* what I'm suggesting you should do; *ignore* the people that you think are vicious.

Is that what you are suggesting?

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

I'm not sure yet how to phrase it, but I have come to the conclusion that the dual nature of reviews is part of the problem.

On the one hand, reviews are code criticism: they are extra work spent by the reviewer to try and help you improve your work.

On the other hand, they are also quality checks. Reviews serve to spot bugs, misdesigns, noncompliance with project standards, etc. before they ever go into the code base.

The problems start when these start having a contradictory impact on the correct course of action in a discussion, or in the longer term in dealing with a person. For example, I have attempted to deal with Felipe at one point by refusing to review, i.e., ignore the email.

However, this must be weighed against the requirements of the second kind of review. So while it is exceedingly easy for everyone to say "just ignore the flamebait", the flamewars keep recurring because this "gatekeeper" type of review continues to be necessary, and continues to elicit nonconstructive responses.

The "easy" solution is to simply stop taking patches from Felipe, but opens pandora's box w.r.t. the just application of such a measure, as Ram has noted repeatedly.

Yet that is the only measure that I currently know that both keeps up code review standards and has any hope of improving the current climate.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:

Why do you assume the review is for the patch submitter? You can reply so your review is stored on the record, and the maintainer, Junio, can see it. Then you can ignore the fallout.

I think this type of review is hurtful, because the fact that you said some words doesn't mean you are right, and you might be blocking a perfectly good patch by not following up the counter arguments.

Presumably you are not worried about that, and you would be content with simply blocking all my patches. Whatever floats your boat.

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

OK.

In short, the only acceptable response to review comments are "You are right. Here is a reroll", or "I think your suggestion will miss these cases which I wanted to cover and that is why I did it this way". There may be other small variants of the above two, but I think I can agree with the general principle.

In cases, there are two or more equally valid approaches to solving a problem. I do not think I had to accept (or reject) many "it can be done better in different ways and this perhaps is not the best one" (or "it could be argued that it is correct") borderline topics in the recent past, but I suspect that "a disagreement is healthy" has to be accompanied by how disagreements that do not resolve themselves are resolved (I think I've heard somewhere that some communities break ties in favor of reviewers, for example).

I think this is 30% aimed at me (as I think I do about that much of the reviews around here). I fully agree with most of them, but the last sentence is a bit too fuzzy to be a practically useful guideline. Somebody's bare minimum is somebody else's perfection. An unqualified "perfect is the enemy of good" is often incorrectly used to justify "It works for me." and "There already are other codepaths that do it in the same wrong way.", both of which make things _worse_ for the long term project health.

I would think it is perfectly OK to say "The way you are refusing to listen to constructive comments is not how things work around here" by pointing at a set of guidelines.

Why do you think is it not OK?  The "beating" part?

On 06/11/2013 07:00 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I agree that the last line is fuzzy. And I don't think that I've observed any cases where I thought that reviewers were being too strict, so in a way it's just trying to head off hypothetical future problems and to make sure that the balance between submitter and reviewer is not *entirely* one-sided. Given our (proper, I think) strong deference to reviewers, one could imagine a reviewer abusing his/her authority to obstruct reasonable changes by (for example) making demands that the submitter also fix tangentially-related things that are beyond the scope of the patch.

In my own projects I have a rough policy of "not worse than before", meaning that as long as a patch makes progress in at least one dimension, and doesn't make things worse in any other dimension, then it is acceptable. (Of course "worse" can include internal quality issues like copy-pasting code or even an increase in the amount of code disproportionate to its benefit.) A failure to make improvements in one area should not be a reason to block an improvement in another area, as long as nothing is made worse.

But I can't right now think of a succinct way to express what I have in mind.

I agree.

I think it would be counterproductive for people to start saying things like "that is a violation of rule 3, section 2" *in everyday discussions*. This shouldn't be taken as a list of black-and-white laws, with allegations of small "infractions" used to shut down discussions. And on the other hand, if somebody shows a long history of acting contrary to the guidelines, and persists despite repeated requests to stop, I don't want the discussion to turn into a lawyerly analysis of the guidelines with point-by-point rebuttals and counter-rebuttals of whether this or that guideline was violated.

The guidelines should just describe the expected tone of the community in a way that the vast majority of participants can agree on, and any kind of actions to enforce the guidelines should only be taken when an overwhelming majority of the community

I think the CommunityGuidelines should have three main uses:

1. An artifact documenting the community consensus about what kinds of
behaviors are encouraged and what kinds are considered unacceptable.  It
should only be accepted, and it only has value, if there is a strong
consensus in favor of it.

2. A resource to help new community members get up to speed on our
practices and expectations.

3. As a point of reference in the direst meltdowns, such as IMO we are
having right now.

Michael

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 10:00:56AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

One thing that I think is missing from these proposals so far is some clear indication that a review should not be confrontational. Consider the following two review comments (taken from a recent example that happened to stick in my mind, but I don't want to single out any one individual here):

    Ugh, why this roundabout-passive-past tone?  Use imperative tone
    like this:

        ...

vs.

    We normally use the imperative in commit messages, perhaps like
    this?

        ...

Both say the same thing but the first immediately puts the submitter on the defensive. If I see something like that on one of my patches I have to consciously resist the urge to reply immediately and instead review what I'm about to send once I've calmed down.

I realise that we shouldn't take offence to review comments, but we are all human and it is sometimes hard not to take things personally.

In the examples above, the first makes it feel like the submitter is fighting to get a patch included, but the second feels like we're collaborating to get to the best result for the project.

As my mother would say, "politeness costs nothing" ;-)

John Keeping wrote:

The review is being honest about her feelings in the first one, and being artificially diplomatic in the second one. Both of them are constructive and friendly, in that they provide an example for the submitter to follow.

Either way, I'm not interested in problems that have no solutions. The only "solution" I see here is to suffocate every contributor until they are "tactful enough" for the majority's liking, and "remove" the ones that don't conform. If you do have an alternate solution, please share it with us.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 12:16:28AM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

I don't think it is artificially diplomatic, it's an attempt to convey a helpful tone in an email. As has been said elsewhere, it is easy to read an email in the wrong tone (there is an oft-cited statistic about the percentage of communication that is non-verbal, and which cannot be inferred from written text). For this reason I think it is important for reviewers to make an effort to minimise the risk that what they write can be interpreted as being aggressive.

Both provide the same advice, yes. But I disagree that they are both friendly. The top example reads (to me at least) as an attack on the submitter for not knowing better. It may sometimes be necessary to resort to strong wording if someone appears to be wilfully ignoring sensible advice but we should not expect every submitter to know the expectations of the project; the first message to someone should gently guide them in the right direction.

I don't have a solution, only a hope that regular contributors will learn from others how they can phrase review comments less aggressively.

I expect different people will read the same statement differently; people are from different cultures and what is considered acceptable in one culture can be considered rude in another. We should aim to cultivate our own culture where we try to minimise the risk that what we write will be misinterpreted by someone with a different cultural background.

John Keeping wrote:

Okay, so answer this: Why did the reviewer deliberately use the "unhelpful" tone? Was she trying to attack the new contributor, and intend to harm the community? Or did she just say what came to her mind?

Yes, it is.

Correct.

The reviewer is not a thick-skinned bull that wants to harm the project.

4. Lead by example.  If you do not like how someone presents
themselves on the list, you counter it by presenting yourself nicely
on the list.  Others will follow your example, making that person's
behavior the minority.  It is far more powerful than explicitly
stating what is "acceptable" behavior and what is not.

So you have agreed that "tone" is subjective, and that attempting to objectively state the "right tone" is a lost cause.

The solution to the problem, as I have already explained several times is to:
- Define an objective basis for people to react.
- Lead by example, and influence other contributors to follow your style.

What everyone is doing differently:
- Taking offense at every possible juncture.
- Taking sides and voting.  Ganging up and playing politics.
- Making bad irrational arguments in the "right tone".
- Invalidating entire arguments, on the basis of tone.
- Making tone the entire subject of discussion, ignoring content.
- Bringing "majority opinion" to a rational argument.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 04:56:27PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

I think that's what everyone is trying to do, the problem is when the axiom "others will follow your example" fails. In that case it is important to address the issue.

It is equally important to do this in a way that does not assume malice on the part of the reviewer. It is quite possible that when English is not someone's first language then they may not realise how their words are being interpreted by some people. In this case a friendly message sent off the mailing list may be appropriate.

It is subjective *to some degree*. If a reviewer takes care, then it is possible to write a message that minimises the risk that the words can be interpreted in a way that is not what was intended.

If we do end up having community guidelines, then I think that point is very important. It is equally important that readers do not assume that the tone in which they read an email is that in which it was intended but I think that human nature makes that half harder.

On 06/11/2013 08:29 PM, John Keeping wrote:

That's a very good point (and a good illustration, too). How do you like the new second and third sentences below?

* When reviewing other peoples' code, be tactful and constructive.
Remember that submitting patches for public critique can be very
intimidating and when mistakes are found it can be embarrassing.  Do
what you can to make it a positive and pleasant experience for the
submitter.  Set high expectations, but do what you can to help the
submitter achieve them.  Don't demand changes based only on your
personal preferences. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

(As Junio pointed out, the last sentence is not so great and a better replacement would be welcome.)

Does your mother program C?  We could use her around here :-)

Michael

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 08:52:05PM +0200, Michael Haggerty wrote:

I'm not sure. I like the intent, but I'm not sure that it's clear enough that we're talking about the tone of comments rather than the type of feedback to provide.

How about something like this?

    * Having your code reviewed should feel like a collaboration aiming
      for the best result for the project, not like a fight to get your
      patch accepted.  Try to bear this in mind when reviewing other
      peoples' code and consider how you would feel reading the same
      comments if the review was the other way round.  We are only human
      and the tone of a review can influence how the following
      discussion progresses.
      
    * If you do feel that a review is aggressive, don't reply
      immediately.  Contributors are spread around the world in
      different timezones and it is often better to wait a few hours for
      others to comment before rushing to defend your patch.

From: "Michael Haggerty" <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 7:52 PM
[...]

I found this to be true. The tone on the list could at times feel un-helpful (to the new person). It is almost as if it is an initiation - those on the list know the protocols, and new folk either arrive like a bull in a china shop, or more likely, timidly push the patch under the door and run away (and variations in between) - some never push out their (drafted) patch.

Sometimes it isn't 'mistakes', rather it is simply a lack of sufficient explanation to communicate intent, which may not have been understood by the reviewer/responder. In such cases it can be a frustration to know what was meant in the response, especially if the response is terse. [i.e. I think it would be reasonable to squeeze part of this in here somewhere to guide new contributors about this step]

There is separately a need to note the role of the maintainer, who has a more difficult role as gatekeeper who's higher standards in applying the precautionary principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle can feel like unhelpfulness, or worse if misunderstood.

I think she programmed in Smalltalk and CleanYourRoom. (sorry not my question ;-)

regards Philip

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> wrote:

Interesting! I've had the opposite opinion. I've often been surprised at how much constructive feedback has been given, and the thoughtfulness of the reviewers to offer up alternative solutions, show examples, etc. Junio, Jeff, and especially Jonathan have been particularly good on that front--at least those are some of the regulars that stick out in my mind. Overall, I've been pretty happy with the community, and while I haven't contributed much, I generally enjoy reading the emails. I feel like I learn something new all the time. :-)

-John

Philip Oakley <philipoakley <at> iee.org> writes: 

Nb. there is purely-objective programming language named Smalltalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

From: "Jakub Narebski" <jnareb@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 3:49 PM

Yes, I knew that <smiles>. It was deliberate. Good to see someone spotted it.

Philip 

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 1:29 PM, John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> wrote:

That's right, I agree with everything you said, but what would your mother say about the people are not polite towards you? I doubt it would be "fuck them then".

You should be polite, you should not demand politeness. Being polite towards the people that are polite to you barely has any merit, swallowing your pride, taking a deep breath, trying to understand that the other side might be just having a bad day, or any number of reasons for the impoliteness... that's what takes effort.

Escalating violence is easy, blaming the other side for starting is also easy (as any toddler would tell you), being the side that puts the other cheek is what's hard.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 10:00:56AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

I more or less agree with what both of you have said above. The "ties goes to reviewers" thing I would be very wary of, at least as a hard rule. We do not (and do not want to) put any restrictions on who is allowed to do review. That sometimes results in unhelpful or even wrong reviews by new people, but those reviews are a stepping stone to being a more experienced and capable reviewer.

Most of the time such reviews are resolved by other community members joining the discussion and coming to some agreement, but not always. And that is not even getting into the cases where long-time experienced reviewers are simply wrong or misguided, or the issue is legitimately a difficult tradeoff to consider, and the discussion ends in a stalemate.

And I think that is where the benevolent dictator role comes in. They weigh not just the points made in the discussion (or a summary of it), but also use their judgement on who is making comments (how many people, the utility of their past comments) and other factors (other things happening in the project, being conservative because of recent mistakes made, etc). They may break such a tie by applying or rejecting, even by putting off a decision to revisit later (which is a de facto reject, of course).

So there are no hard rules, and this is not a democracy[1]. For the most part the community runs itself in an open and collective fashion, and the dictator's job is easy; but ultimately, he or she is in charge of what gets applied and what doesn't. Rules like "break ties in favor of reviewers" are just a guideline for the dictator to use in making decisions.

I do not think any of that is news to you, but I think the point needs to be made, as it applies to any concrete rules.

-Peff

[1] Note that I think a benevolent dictator is a _terrible_ way to run a
    real government, but it works in an open source project. I think the
    difference is that dictatorship is open to abuse of power. In the
    real world, there is a lot of power to abuse, and it is hard for
    people to opt out of it. In the open source world, there is not that
    much power, and if there is a bad dictator everyone can go somewhere
    else (another project, or even a fork). So while a dictator _can_
    play favorites, or start deciding which patches to take based on
    what they had for breakfast, there is a real incentive to remain
    fair and reasonable.

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

My original draft had "I am hoping we do not have to come to that" after "(I heard some communities break ties this way)", but I removed it by mistake.

And I think you are right. I also am hoping that I am being fair to dictate ;-)

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Fair? Fairness requires to judge each action without biases, nor double standards. In the case of an open source community it requires you to listen to the arguments before dismissing them, and consider the patches before dropping them on the floor. Fairness requires no favoritism.

You think you are being fair? You have acted the equivalent of a judge that says "oh, you again? I don't need to look at the case, you are a drunk and you go to jail". I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm saying you can't call that fair.

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 06:19:23PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

At least in development communities that *I* run, if someone were as rude to me as you have been in some previous exchanges to Junio, I would have set the bozo bit a long time ago and reviewed your submissions with a very jaudiced eye, and treated your non-technical arguments with same amount of attention as I give madmen and drunkards in the street. Junio has given you *far* more latitude than I would have.

Keep in mind, the demands for respect go in both directions, and in non-technical matters about style and "good taste", at the end of the day the maintainer does get to have the final say, because he or she is the one who applies the patches or accepts the pull request. So if the maintainer says something like, "maintaining ABI backwards compatibility for libext2fs (or for kernel syscalls) is critically important", that's not up to you. Sending me abusive e-mails about how I'm not listening to your arguments isn't going to help. You can try to change my mind with reasoned arguments, but for questions like that, or what functions do or don't belong in a library, the maintainer is the benevolent dictator.

Things a very different for things like "this change causes a 30% performance regression in a particular workload". For those sorts of technical questions, a much more collaborative discussion style is important. But for questions of what is and isn't "good taste", it's not a good idea to reply to a maintainer's e-mail with "that's your opinion" over and over again. For things like that it *IS* his (or her) opinion, and if you can't live with it, you'll save a lot of bandwidth on the mailing list by moving on to some other project.

Regards,

					- Ted

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

Yeah, you certainly can do that, but a judge cannot do that, can he?

I'm not abusing anyone. Junio is making the mistake of thinking he is being fair, I made the judge analogy so that he can see that he is not acting like a judge. A judge has an obligation of being fair, so he acts fairly, Junio don't have that obligation, yet he thinks he is being fair when he is not.

That is not abuse, that is pointing the truth.

Yes, he makes the decision, that doesn't mean the rationale for the decision is correct.

He is making the decision based on the idea that init_copy_notes_for_rewrite() (and similar) will be used by binaries other than 'git'. He is wrong.

The problem is he doesn't accept it's his opinion. He thinks it's a fact.

Jeff King wrote:

Junio has one of the hardest jobs of all: his sense of fairness plays a major role in determining the health of the project.

That said, I'm quite happy with Junio's sensibilities. He's not devoid of shortcomings, but that is an unrealistic expectation.

Do not confuse "democracy" with "rule of the majority" (not implying that you are; just saying). Governments have been voted out of power because they failed to protect minority interests. When it comes to a decision like "whether or not to execute this rapist", the government does not make a decision based on the votes of the common public. It has a constitution, and courts where it is interpreted and decisions are made. Cases are often not won or lost on the basis of "hard rules", but on the force of the arguments that the two lawyers present. There are societies that use the jury system to lessen the burden on the judge; but again, a decision cannot be made on the basis of majority: the jury panel must reach a consensus.

It's not all that different from what happens in this community, I think.

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

I agree that on-boarding is an important process.

In addition to the reviews I'd give to regulars, I personally try to do some of these things:

 - Even in a negative review, end the message with "Thanks".  More
   important is to express that the particular patch is rejected but
   contributor's future contribution (either a reroll or a separate
   topic) is welcome.

   This is free, and there is no reason not to be nice.

 - Point out problems in a milder way than usual.  Instead of saying
   "Why is this done like so?", risking to be misinterpreted that I
   am saying the patch did something wrong and the contributor was a
   horrible programmer, rephrase it to "Hmph, this may work in such
   and such cases, but I wonder how well it would in this case?",
   followed by "How about going this route instead, which would
   cover all these cases?"

   Doing so is more time consuming at reviewers' end; once you know
   the current design well enough, you can immediately smell a wrong
   approach a lot faster by just looking at code and design in a
   patch, without having to come up with a concrete example.

 - Instead of just pointing out minor nits and have the new
   contributor reroll, point them out, and then show how the patch
   should have looked like, often after "-- >8 --" and the "From:"
   line that keeps attribution.

   Again this is more work at reviewers' end.

Coaching new contributors, like mentoring GSoC students, is often more time consuming than scratching the same itch yourself for any reviewer, but it is an investment, which hopefully yields dividend in the longer term.

On 06/12/2013 10:02 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Thanks for these concrete examples / suggestions for reviewers. I remember especially that during my first contacts with the Git community I was very impressed by these very things in your code reviews and in those of other reviewers.

Are you proposing that your text should find its way into the CommunityGuidelines in some form? I hesitate to make the document *so* long, especially considering that the section for contributors would then probably also be expanded by a similar amount. But I think distilling the advice into one or two sentences, also taking into account the suggestions of others in this thread, would be a definite improvement.

When I have time I want to submit some form of CommunityGuidelines as an explicit patch, and I will try to synthesize all of the suggestions that have been made.

Michael

Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> writes:

It actually was the other way around ;-).

After reading your message, I tried to think aloud by listing what I try to do, and I was impressed that your three-line advice was a very concise and very well written summary of that. I agree that a guideline should be kept as concise and clear as possible.

The main point of my message was that reviewing and coaching may be costly, but we have to do them as an investment.

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 8:28 AM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> wrote:

I think there's an even more important number 0:

Always assume good faith. When discussing through digital mediums, it's very easy to misconstrue the tone and intentions of other parties, so it's better to err on the side of caution, and if one is mistaken, assuming good faith doesn't cause harm, while the contrary does irreparable damage. This does not mean that one should continue to assume good faith when there's evidence to the contrary.

I don't like the wording of this. "Attacker", "humiliation", "everyone"; it's very absolutist rhetoric. Yes, you see the other person as an attacker, and yes you think she is humiliating herself in front of everyone, but thinking so doesn't make it so.

An even better and less absolutist version would be:

Do not participate in flamewars. It is very tempting to prove somebody else wrong, but if you think a discussion is turning into a flamewar, just say so, and avoid it. Do not throw lumber to the flames. You might feel you should correct the erroneous claims being made in public, but by replying you are making things worst. Leave the erroneous (in your opinion) claims alone, the damage has been done, all that is left is what *you* can do, and the best you can do is ignore them.

It might be better to turn this negative rule into a positive one: "Discuss on the basis of logic and evidence". Then you can describe the common logical fallacies, and I would add "If you make a claim, be prepared it to defend it with evidence, or add an appropriate qualifier; probably, most likely, I think, etc."

I think you should reply, but not to her, to the mailing list, asking for others to don't reply. Then mute the thread. I already explained that about in the comment about flamewars.

There's a corollary to that that works rather well in the LKML; you are permitted one flamewar per year. I'm not going to explain why this is a good thing, because unfortunately there's an irrational negative bias against me already, but there's a reason why this is a good rule. Even if you don't agree it's only one flamewar per year per person, it's not that much.

Felipe Contreras wrote:

Agreed.  "Always assume good faith" is a good rule of thumb.

I went for the absolutist version because I felt that this point needs to be driven in harder. This is the biggest problem, in my opinion.

But yeah, your version is more technically correct.

Good addition.

I don't think "neglect" is the solution to anything. We don't want contributors to feel neglected; we want to make them understand that their behavior was undesirable because of reasons X, Y, and Z. In a raging fire, they might not be able to see these reasons clearly.

I suppose it's a way for people to vent built-up emotion. Flamewars will happen, no matter what we do; we cannot control the actions of others. If too many people want to start a fire, we can do nothing: I don't propose an iron hand of suffocation. My objective is more realistic: it is to make people realize the undesirable effects and "minimize" fires.

Hello,

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 06:58:47PM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

[...]

I often come across so-called "community guidelines" in other projects---some of which adhere to them quite strictly, and others simply document something for the curious. But usually the reason for their existence in the first place are tell-tale signs of trying to fix a problem at the wrong end, and I believe this is what is about to happen if a document such as this ever becomes official.

There's no disputing the fact that over the last few weeks, FC's behaviour has been called in to question. He's managed to rub a lot of core people up the wrong way, and in doing so has deliberately side-stepped that problem by doing the one thing which puts anyone trying to raise that point muted; by assuming that he's right.

It's a point on which one is never going to win, because no matter what one says, it'll just get twisted round in such a way that one then ends up questioning their own words, and their own conduct, and that's bad, because there never was anything wrong with them to begin with.

So when you realise this point, it becomes almost impossible to proceed further with any kind of discussion, because even the technical points of discussion then end up being lost in a tirade of needless side-stepping discussion. It's a bullying tactic on the part of FC which means he'll do any, and everything, to get his own way.

So I say to all those seasoned reviewers out there on this list not to put up with it.

There comes a point, regardless of how useful someone's contribution may be, that if the barrier to entry is so high that any kind of criticism or comment made against code comes with a massive chance of having to defend yourself against innocence on the part of the reviewer, that those contributions should be shelved. I've seen also another yardstick used to defend FC's behaviour, and that is one of "commits within the last three months". That count is completely meaningless, since the review process is always going to be the same.

So these guidelines gain the community nothing, and only serve to punish those who are already following them, without them being written down, because the root-cause of the problem is still here, and isn't going to go away, no matter how much referring to these guidelines might help.

That is why I think this is the wrong thing to do.

-- Thomas Adam

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 5:19 AM, Thomas Adam <thomas@xteddy.org> wrote:

Perhaps because you are actually wrong.

In the words of Tyrion Lannister: "Why do you want me to shut up? Am I starting to make sense?"

Questioning our own ideas is the hallmark of a rational person.

You start the side-stepping the moment you say "I don't like your tone", which is precisely why one should concentrate on the argument being made, and not *how* it's being made. I'm not the only one that things that way, read the extremely useful article from Paul Graham[1].

It is you the one that is against concentrating on the technical points of the discussion.

If you are suggesting punitive measures, let me remind you that any modern society follows principles established in the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago. Before being punished by the state, every person has the right to a speedy trial, and the trial of course has to be based on *the written law*.

If we don't have by-laws, you cannot be blamed to have violated them, and you are even against guidelines, so on what basis are you going to determine that somebody has acted in an illicit way? The opinion of a single dictator? Mob rule?

It doesn't matter how you cut it, that would not be the rule of law[2], a concept that has been in the civilized world even longer, for thousands of years.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Thomas Adam <thomas@xteddy.org> wrote:

I don't know if some guidelines will gain the community anything, but there might be another solution to the current problems in the community along the following lines:

- decide that later this year (for example next october or september)
there could be a developer
meeting/conference/merge/gittogether/whatever somewhere in North
America

- ask many developers who contributed to Git significantly, including
those involved in the last flamewars, if they could come and if they
would need financial help to come

- ask some companies to sponsor the meeting by providing money, space,
food, beer, accomodation, whatever they want

- maybe ask Git developers or users living neer the meeting place if
the developers coming could crash at their place

- announce the meeting, thanks the sponsors, by the way thanks a lot
GitHub for the git merge 2013 last May in Berlin

- meet, discuss stuff, have a lot of beers together, write stupid joke
patches together and send them to the list

- reimburse the developers who came for their travel and if needed
accomodation expenses

- thank everyone for coming and having a good time together and thank
the sponsors again, by the way thank you guys who came to the git
merge 2013 and thank you again Github, for organizing it and Uber and
Google for sponsoring it

It might not work but it might be a nice try :-)

Thanks, Christian.