[zeromq-dev] Contribution policy and quality of commits

Martin Lucina martin at lucina.net
Sat Jan 28 02:58:37 CET 2012


Hi all,

as you may have noticed, a new contribution policy for libzmq has been put
in place: http://www.zeromq.org/docs:contributing

I would like to draw your attention to the following points:

> The team that manages patches back to libzmq are the "maintainers".
> Maintainers are not developers and they have no opinion on patches; their
> job is to enforce process.

and

> The maintainers will aggressively and optimistically merge pull requests
> back to libzmq master, with minimal opinion on quality and relevance. The
> only hard requirement is that the patch can be automatically merged.

and

> Anyone who is discontent with a patch will make their own patch to fix
> or reverse the previous patch. Again, maintainers have no opinion on
> this.

and finally,

> If you want an analogy for the Maintainer role, think of Wikipedia's
> "Edit this page" function.

Reading the points above it seems to me that the maintainers have absconded
themselves of any QA role, based on a view of patches to code being
equivalent to literary prose.

Based on the process above, the role of a maintainer equates to a robot
clicking on "apply this pull request".

If you look at the quality of commits to libzmq since this policy has been
put in place, from a software engineering point of view the quality of
commits is suboptimal.

While it is a laudable goal, if you are Wikipedia, to enable anyone to
contribute and rewrite anyone elses prose, libzmq is primarily a *software
engineering* project. The cost of rewriting prose is low compared to the
cost of rewriting code.

Thoughts? Most of us here are software engineers by trade, surely you can
see where this is leading.

-mato



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