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

[Martijn Verburg]

Hi Dalibor,

The intention definitely wasn't to track people (which I agree is counter
productive), but the patch itself. I don't think there's even an assignment
to a particular person process for a patch right?  I was thinking more a
case of "Contributor X followed all the right procedures and is now waiting
for *any* reviewer within project Y".

Taking the "let's promote the contributor guide" is a good path.  Which
gets me thinking along the same lines.

How about we split up the project mailing lists amongst the adoption
members to monitor for new people. If a new contributor pops in then that
adoption member can send a std welcome message (we can template this on the
wiki) basically saying "Hi welcome to OpenJDK etc, BTW here's how you
contribute working code and here's the adoption group mailing list so that
you don't flood this list with procedural Q's".

Would that help/work you think?

Cheers,
Martijn

On 24 November 2015 at 17:40, dalibor topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com>
wrote:

> 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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