[Mono-dev] Pull Requests

[David Nelson]

"Long term, the ideal situation is one where we can give more people commit
rights, and review rights.   But until we have developed the skills in the
community that are needed, we will continue with the current setup."

This seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem. We need to christen more
reviewers in order to handle the volume of PRs and keep the Mono community
engaged; but in order to gain enough confidence in a contributor to make
them a reviewer, their requests need to be reviewed! How can we "develop
the skills in the community" if requests routinely sit idle for over a year?

I got really excited about contributing to Mono about two years ago; I love
.NET and C#, but many of my colleagues (not to mention many of the
companies for which we consult) are staunchly anti-Windows; I wanted to
help demonstrate that Mono could be a viable alternative for non-Windows
development. But research into the state of the community left me
disappointed: PRs are ignored, roadmaps are horribly out of date, builds
are constantly broken...in general, not an environment that encourages
community members to contribute their valuable time.

I understand the desire to maintain a high standard for contributed code,
and I support maintaining that standard; but a process MUST be developed
that encourages community contribution rather than stagnating it.

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:31 PM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at xamarin.com> wrote:

> Hello Greg,
>
> The best approach is to stay engaged in the pull requests and bring the
> attention to the mailing list for us to discuss.
>
> Long term, the ideal situation is one where we can give more people commit
> rights, and review rights.   But until we have developed the skills in the
> community that are needed, we will continue with the current setup.
>
> The bar for mono is high: we can not just take any code and distribute it,
> since the impact of mistakes is large.
>
> To give an example, even new Xamarin employees that are hired to work
> exclusively on the runtime are working through pull requests, and they also
> have to wait for some of the more senior people to review and approve the
> patches.   We have very nice fixes that we still postpone until we have the
> bandwidth of doing a full review.
>
> In the meantime, if you need quick hacks, you can always fork Mono and
> distribute your forked version with your changes.
>
> Miguel
>
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Greg Young <gregoryyoung1 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> This topic has been brought up in a ton of other threads I just want
>> to centralize the topic.
>>
>> I have felt the pain many others have discussed (6-12 months for an
>> accept of PR, we actually had a separate distribution of mono for a
>> while).
>>
>> Is there background on the issue?
>> What are the issues that are involved from a xamarin perspective?
>> How can the community help?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Greg
>>
>> --
>> Studying for the Turing test
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>> Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
>> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
>>
>
>
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>
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