Community-Help for the core-team in deadline-times

[dalibor topic]

Well, there are two different aspects here.

Firstly, tracking one's own progress is a good idea. It's the tracking 
of other people without their consent that's problematic & creepy.

So, in terms of tracking one's own progress, how can a would-be 
contributor evaluate their progress? Well, 
http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/ provides a simple sequence of steps 
to work with.

For example, whether you fulfilled step 0 is easy to check on the list 
of OCA signatories at 
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oca-486395.html .

Did you "Discuss your intended change" as step 2 asks to? Easy to check 
in a mailing list archive. Did anyone care? Also easy to check in the 
same way.

If a patch has been sent, did it get a bug id? If so, it's easy to track 
in the JBS. If it gets committed, the commit gets noted as a comment by 
hgupdater. And so on.

Where I see things sometimes fail, is when people skip steps, and go 
straight to sending patches, without establishing context first - is the 
change welcome & necessary at this stage of development of a project, 
will there be someone to help me go through the reviews, etc.

That sometimes works, but sometimes also fails hard (as it *should*), 
because all those other people on mailing lists are, surprisingly enough 
;), not there for one's amusement alone - instead they have their own 
lives, priorities, goals, etc. - regardless who they work for, even.

So the important thing here is to ensure that new contributors follow 
existing processes, which make it easy for them to figure out whether 
their ideas have any traction in the OpenJDK Community or not, and to 
discourage them to just randomly throw patches on mailing lists that 
ultimately no one may care about without going through the requisite 
motions of establishing context and need.

If an idea gets no traction after the second or the third ping to the 
list, it's a fair guess that it's not meant to be at this time. It may 
be an idea whose time has not come yet.

That's OK. To paraphrase Monty Python, not every patch is sacred.

The other aspect is where new contributors are encouraged to contribute.

Encouraging new contributors to start their OpenJDK hacking on JDK 9 or 
JDK 8 Updates Projects directly, for example, and to try to get some 
random change in there can be rather taxing on their enthusiasm - 
metaphorically speaking, it's like encouraging someone who has just 
discovered the joy of jogging to run next weekend's marathon. It'd be no 
wonder if they dropped out of the race.

Instead, new contributors who want to work on code in OpenJDK, should 
typically be encouraged to participate in new Projects. Such Projects 
are usually much smaller, more focused on a single goal, and more 
pleasant to learn & evolve in. With the most recent Projects around 
Shenandoah, the Arm32 Port and the Mobile Port, there are now three new 
venues for new contributors to contribute to.

cheers,
dalibor topic

On 24.11.2015 09:59, Martijn Verburg wrote:
>
> If tracking patches is deemed to be a bad idea, what do you suggest we
> can do to improve this situation?


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