Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

I dislike seeing “review not granted” or “review canceled” in my bugmail.

Even if the reviewer provides helpful comments and points out things that you missed, those few words are the first thing you see about your patch. Part of me understands that these headlines are informative messages, that they are not judgements on me as a person, merely some sort of judgement on the patch that I have written. But the language doesn’t encourage that perspective. Permissions are not granted, entrance is not granted, your favorite show on television is canceled, and so forth. These are not heartening words: they are words that shut you out, that indicate your contribution was not desirable.

— Nathan Froyd

The best and worst part of documentation strings is making something sensible out of 80 characters—doubly hard when the name of a function is the Lomb Normalized Periodogram. That's 27 characters right there!

— Ben Lewis

(Log in to post comments)

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 24, 2012 22:06 UTC (Fri) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]

> If at all possible, once the author makes the changes you have requested,
> r+ the patch. Your feedback can be thought of as a contract with the
> patch author: you do these things and the patch is good enough. Don’t
> change the terms of the contract. File a followup bug, if need be.

Yes!

Yes, yes, yes! I cannot overemphasize how frustrating it is to have the goalposts moved after working days or weeks on a patch. It is almost the best way to drive away contributions from your project.

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 27, 2012 22:41 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

At least a comment to the effect of "I got this far and saw these major problems; I'll go over things with a fine-toothed comb after that stuff is fixed". Knowing that there *are* further goalposts would be enough, IMO.