Hi,
both Geotools and GeoServer are starting to get their share of “problematic”
pull requests so I’ve started this thread (sorry for the cross post) to discuss
if we can do anything about it.
Basically, in both projects we have seen at least one pull request so far that was
coded by someone completely extraneous to the active developer community,
get no communication on the devel list, and sometimes resulting in patches
that cannot simply be committed due to a variety of problems.
I believe this is sad, especially since some of these patches contain a lot of work,
and wondering what we could do about it.
Basically, the message to get out should be simple,
we should tell people that they need to discuss their grand plan on the devel mailing list
before getting down to business, and that there are norms to be respected and the like.
It is probably fair to assume these people are not experienced with community development
and only look at GitHub, do the fork and go their own merry way… so the only place
where they might get the message is on the project GitHub home.
Now, I’ve noticed that none of the projects have a README in the root that would be
rendered by GitHub in the project home page, and GitHub is actually nagging us about it.
Soo… how about we dedicate that home page to provide just a few pointers for
people finding us through GitHub:
a set of links to where the community is (site, mailing lists)
a quick set of directions to the contributors, in particular, a very clear message that
going off your merry way and pop up with a large pull request later is not a smart approach?
Github also has CONTRIBUTING.md which is a magic file[1]. It shows up when creating a pull request and/or issue in the web interface with the message “Please review the guidelines for contributing to this repository.”
Interesting. Too bad they decided to show the contents of that file only when the pull request
is done, the kind of damage I was talking about is already done when one is ready to do the pull
request… but this still works for small pull requests, like when people provide a fix without
including a test case with it
Github also has CONTRIBUTING.md which is a magic file[1]. It shows up when creating a pull request and/or issue in the web interface with the message “Please review the guidelines for contributing to this repository.”
Interesting. Too bad they decided to show the contents of that file only when the pull request
is done, the kind of damage I was talking about is already done when one is ready to do the pull
request… but this still works for small pull requests, like when people provide a fix without
including a test case with it
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Github also has CONTRIBUTING.md which is a magic file[1]. It shows up when creating a pull request and/or issue in the web interface with the message “Please review the guidelines for contributing to this repository.”
Interesting. Too bad they decided to show the contents of that file only when the pull request
is done, the kind of damage I was talking about is already done when one is ready to do the pull
request… but this still works for small pull requests, like when people provide a fix without
including a test case with it
Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single
web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware,
SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial.
Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov
–
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.
Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single
web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware,
SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial.
Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov