[Mono-dev] Pull Requests

[David Nelson]

(Assuming this was directed at me...)

I am not sure what facts you believe I "cherry picked". I didn't really
present any facts; I just shared my observations as an aspiring Mono
contributor.

"As for contributing, which one of *your* pull requests have been pending
and not being reviewed?"

That is precisely the point I was trying to make: I have (to this point)
chosen not to contribute because my observations have not convinced me that
such contributions would be an effective use of my time. As I said before,
I love .NET and C#, and I appreciate the effort that has gone into building
Mono; and I would like nothing better to contribute to the success of the
Mono platform. But I have a full time job that doesn't include working on
Mono, and if I am going to spend my personal time contributing to a
project, I need to know that time is being well spent.

This thread is not the first time this subject has come up in the last few
months; I am hardly the first person to suggest that contributing to Mono
is harder than it needs to be. I'm not trying to place blame on anyone, I
am just asking that those who have the most influence consider what they
can do to make Mono a more contributor-friendly project.

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:30 PM, Miguel de Icaza <miguel at xamarin.com> wrote:

> There is no point in starting a discussion where you are going to cherry
> pick facts for the sake of your argument.
>
> As for contributing, which one of *your* pull requests have been pending
> and not being reviewed?
>
> Because we would like to provide you with the valuable feedback that you
> need to turn these contributions into patches.
>
> Miguel
>
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:25 PM, David Nelson <eatdrinksleepcode at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> "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
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Mono-devel-list mailing list
>>>> Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
>>>> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Mono-devel-list mailing list
>>> Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
>>> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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