Re: Subject: CFV: New JDK 10 Committer: Erik Österlund

[Roman Kennke]

Am 22.06.2017 um 15:36 schrieb Claes Redestad:
>
>
> On 2017-06-22 14:45, jesper.wilhelmsson at oracle.com wrote:
>>> No rule change needed, but a social shift is long overdue.
>> I'm not sure what you mean by social shift. Do you mean that we
>> should lower the bar for what a significant change is? Or do you mean
>> that we should let our friends slip by because we know that they are
>> good developers?
>
> I think your bar for what's considered a significant change is
> generally way too high, yes, especially for a Committer rule.

I agree with that.
Another way to look at it is to ask 'have we ever run into problems
because the barrier of entry is too low?' I'm thinking the sort of
problem where some random guy commits a fix or two, then disappears and
leaves others with a trail of bugs. I am not aware that something like
this ever happened to OpenJDK. On the other hand: 'did we ever get
problems because the barrier to entry is too high?' Probably. We it not
for the army of paid developers, OpenJDK would most likely look pretty
poor as an open source project. And I *can* remember a bunch of
occasions were competent volunteers with great patches almost fell to
the wayside because of all the bureaucrazy involved.
> I fully agree that the rules should be changed, mostly to take out the
> wording of "significant" from the rules (instead explicitly enumerate
> what types of changes are not to be counted), but merging the Author
> and Committer roles would also be welcome.
It would be very useful to spell out the purpose of the rules. What do
we want to achieve by having those rules? This would probably help to
not get caught up and waste time in arguments about strictly following
the rules, but do something useful for OpenJDK instead.

Roman