Re: Formatting Curmudgeons WAS: MMAP Buffers

All,

> Never, and that's not true. Heikki was being nice; I wouldn't have
> even
> slogged through it long enough to ask the questions he did before
> kicking it back as unusable. A badly formatted patch makes it
> impossible to evaluate whether the changes from a submission are
> reasonable or not without the reviewer fixing it first.

Then you can say that politely and firmly with direct reference to the problem, rather than making
the submitter feel bad.

"Thank you for taking on testing an idea we've talked about on this list for a long time and not
had the energy to test.  However, I'm having a hard time evaluating your patch for a few reasons
...(give reasons).  Would it be possible for you to resolve these and resubmit so that I can give
the patch a good evaluation?"

... and once *one* person on this list has made such a comment, there is no need for two other
hackers to pile on the reformat-your-patch bandwagon.

Our project has an earned reputation for being rejection-happy curmudgeons.  This is something I
heard more than once at MySQLConf, including from one student who chose to work on Drizzle instead
of PostgreSQL for that reason.  I think that we could stand to go out of our way to be helpful to
first-time submitters.

That doesn't mean that we have to accept patches mangled by using an IDE designed for Java, and
which lack test cases.  However, we can be nice about it.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Niceness Nazi

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