On Wednesday 18. September 2013 15.23.56 David Deutsch wrote:I'm mostly lurking on this list at the moment, having made an enquiry a few
>
> Credibility? Eternalize? What? Look - I'm just a FOSS coder and I don't
> care how "professional" or whatever I come across. What I do care about is
> an /honest/ track record that can be seen in my github profile, amongst
> other things. I would like to help out in other projects as well,
> eventually, and I want to be able to offer an honest, cohesive picture of
> how past efforts went about. That's why I showed you what I did for RedBean
> - to give you a direct view into how it went down in another example. If I
> propose help to other projects, I don't think they would care much about
> how "professional" I am, but they would very much appreciate an honest
> picture of the process.
months ago about something that I've not been able to prioritise (more below),
but this thread is too painful to read without commenting.
In principle I also am against the excessive rebase culture that a lot of Free
Software projects employ. The joke about this culture is that in its most
extreme form one wouldn't bother having more than a single commit in a
repository, and that commit would be accompanied by a message reading
"Perfection!", "All done!", "Project complete!" or "Nailed it!"
That you also see projects *making* version control software insisting on
rebasing or collapsing changesets, even though rebasing may be frowned upon
and collapsing changesets may involve advanced functionality, could be
considered akin to hypocrisy: people making tools to manage the information in
software development insisting that such information be thrown away. (Please
note that I'm not saying anything about Roundcube's commit or contributions
policy here.)
However, one should respect that projects do have commit policies for good
reasons. Some of these policies are infuriatingly strict: the Mercurial
project, for example, generally wants a single commit for enhancements, bug
fixes and new features (even though no-one in their right mind would do the
work in a single commit "for real"), and the commit message must adhere to a
specific format; all of this is on top of other policies one may or may not
like (line lengths, discouragement of comments, obligatory tests,
discouragement of new tests, obligatory documentation, and so on). It can take
several iterations to get something that the core developers will accept.
On the one hand, it can seem like people are just making life hard for casual
contributors. I am aware of one project controlled by a large corporation who
apparently makes contributing very much like a "ring of fire" experience
perhaps even more extreme than what I have described above. When people who
are paid to work on a project make more work for volunteers, one can
legitimately question their motives.
On the other hand, it is understandable that core developers do not wish to
readily take on more work that other people have thrown over the wall, giving
those core developers code to maintain forever while the contributors enjoy
the benefits of their work in the resulting product, with the contributed code
magically bug-fixed and updated for any and all of the architectural changes
and transformations that might come about.
As others have pointed out, your work will always be available in the form in
which you made it available if you continue to publish your
repositories/branches. Those who you wish to convince about the substance of
your work will still be able to see it and appreciate your efforts. But you
should also appreciate that those who have to maintain your contributions
should also get to choose how they can work with those contributions. Denying
those people any choice sends a signal that may be interpreted negatively by
others, regardless of whether words like "professional" are in their
vocabulary.
I think it is great to see your enthusiasm to improve Roundcube, and being
much more of a Python developer than someone who uses PHP, your work appears
to be beneficial to people like me. Please don't squander this opportunity to
see good work done by attaching a price to your contributions that may end up
with only you bearing the cost.
Paul
P.S. My original business on this list was to inquire about accessibility
support in Roundcube. If anyone has any thoughts on the topic (whether
Roundcube is perceived to be sufficient/deficient, whether work could be
done), I'd be happy to revive that thread.
_______________________________________________
Roundcube Development discussion mailing list
dev@lists.roundcube.net
http://lists.roundcube.net/mailman/listinfo/dev