always assume good faith

Mon Jun 23 12:29:30 BRT 2014

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at colivre.coop.br
> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 02:31:40PM -0300, Bráulio Bhavamitra wrote:
> > That is the point Aurium and Terceiro: the review process proposed for
> > Noosfero is completely new if you look at other free softwares.
>
> Not it is not.


> > Let me explain: *the reviewers, almost everytime in free software, are
> also
> > commiters*.
>
> In every project who does code review in public, there is *nothing*
> stopping anyone who is not a committed to give input on a given patch.
> The fact is most of the time, only commiters review because only
> committers care enough.
>
That's is the fact, as you already said...

>
> > Also *they have the responsibility for that code to work for
> > the final users*.
>
> No they have not¹. Everyone who cares about Noosfero should feel
> responsible for keeping it in a working state. Of course, the committers
> have a special responsibility as gatekeepers for the code base, but
> ultimately, if *you* take Noosfero and install on *your* server, *you*
> are responsible for it working for them.
>
Yeah, that's the ideal situation (theory). In fact, a smaller group of
people take more responsability.

>
> ¹ Read section 15. of the Affero GPLv3 (COPYING in Noosfero sources)
>
> The whole point of doing everything in the open is to make it possible
> for *anyone* to chime in and review new code before it turns into a
> problem for someone. Anyone, independent of being a commiter or not, can
> say:
>
> - "this breaks when the system is configured for X"
> - "there is a better/simpler way of doing this"
> - "what happens if X?"
> - "you missed there case where the input is X"
>
> or even
>
> - "this works just fine for me, thanks"
>
Ok, that's the basic of free software, and a mailing list or an issue
tracker does that.

>
> As a committer, having this type of input from previous reviewers makes
> *a lot* of difference for me. If there is a previous review saying the
> code is OK, I won't be as rigorous as I would be if I was the first, and
> my review will much probably be a lot faster. If there is more than one
> review from people I trust, with everyone saying "yep, it works for me",
> I might merge the change without even looking much at it.
>
For me, one of the best reviewers is a continuous integration server
(Travis, Gitlab CI, etc) as it says exatcly which commit broke tests. We
don't have that yet on Noosfero core.

>
> > *It really doesn't make sense to review a code if you have no real
> > responsibility that it works on your application*. That's why, Terceiro,
> > the Noosfero's centralization today IS very big.
>
> I think there is a serious misconception here. You are *already*
> responsible for your own sites. You can either review the code and make
> sure it works for you before it gets to the Noosfero master branch, or
> you can wait for the release and *hope* nothing breaks for you.


> If new code breaks for you, of course you can always come here and
> complain after the release, despite the fact that you could have tested
> it before it was even merged, or you could have tested it after the code
> was merged but before it made into a release, or you could have tested
> during release candidates testing period, but didn't.
>
The thing we are talking here is about taking *more* responsiblity, that
is, helping to maintain Noosfero, and not just receiving a bunch of code
done by others and deploying it.

>
> That is completely *your problem*.
>
> From this point of view, reviewing incoming code is *good for you*,
> even before also being good for the community.
>
It is not about good for *me*. I'm talking about the Noosfero as a whole.

>
> > That is why I insist on a descentralization of the process, where
> multiple
> > organizations assume responsability, costs and priorization of software
> > development.
>
> This can already be done now. Review is 99% of the cost, and merge is
> 1%.
>
> > *Many developers passed through Noosfero without assuming
> > responsability*, and that is mainly because of the centralized model
> > Noosfero uses.
>
> Not assuming responsibility just because you cannot commit directly is a
> serious misconception. If you wrote some code, you *will* be blamed if
> it is a problem with it, regardless of you being a commiter or not.
>
Please remember the fact you stated on the beggining.

>
> When I merge some code, I am *not* taking full responsibility for it
> besides asserting that it makes sense *to me*, and it works *for me*.
> The people who wrote, and therefore who care about it, are still
> expected to be responsible for it. Of course, those people might just
> disapear (that happens every day in any project), and then that code
> becomes a problem for *everyone* who uses Noosfero, not just for
> committers.
>
Of course it is not *full*, but it is still is pretty much.

>
> > We at EITA have a proposal about that we are yet to publish to the
> > community.
>
> Sure, let's look at it. I have thought myself sometimes about just
> opening the gates and letting everyone just commit the hell out of the
> repository, but I am still not convinced that it will be any better than
> the current status.
>
Please don't go to the extreme, *again*.

>
> But maybe, no amount of discussion will convince you that you could be
> already doing 99% of the work instead of insisting that you need
> permission to do the remaining 1% before you will be willing to do the
> first 99%.
>
Please look again to the fact you stated on the begginning, and to your
experience with free software, in *practical terms*, *not theorical and
possibilities*.

>
> In principle, I find it difficult to trust someone who never did a code
> review in public to have unrestricted commit access to the Noosfero
> repository. I have no evidence that such someone is capable of detecting
> basic code problems that I usually find in a relatively large share of
> the patches that I review.
>
What is testing? It is composed of automated tests (runned by the continous
integration system, travis, gitlab CI) and users' tests, which we at EITA
and blogoosfero do a lot.
Reviewing for me is mainly about testing. I don't need pretty beautiful
code, even after I have wrote
http://noosfero.org/Development/PatchGuidelines completely for that!

>
> > About forks, we at EITA can't think of it as a solution.
>
> Note that in practice Cirandas is *already* a fork. It is one that is
> always working towards reducing the delta with regards to Noosfero, so
> it is a friendly fork that works together with the community.
>
> Not all forks are Evil™.
>
That is already a fact with Participa and probably many networks in the
future. And of course we can do much better than that.

>
> --
> Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at colivre.coop.br>
> Colivre - Cooperativa de Tecnologias Livres
> http://www.colivre.coop.br/
>
>
>
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>
>


-- 
"Lute pela sua ideologia. Seja um com sua ideologia. Viva pela sua
ideologia. Morra por sua ideologia" P.R. Sarkar

EITA - Educação, Informação e Tecnologias para Autogestão
http://cirandas.net/brauliobo
http://eita.org.br

"Paramapurusha é meu pai e Parama Prakriti é minha mãe. O universo é meu
lar e todos nós somos cidadãos deste cosmo. Este universo é a imaginação da
Mente Macrocósmica, e todas as entidades estão sendo criadas, preservadas e
destruídas nas fases de extroversão e introversão do fluxo imaginativo
cósmico. No âmbito pessoal, quando uma pessoa imagina algo em sua mente,
naquele momento, essa pessoa é a única proprietária daquilo que ela
imagina, e ninguém mais. Quando um ser humano criado mentalmente caminha
por um milharal também imaginado, a pessoa imaginada não é a propriedade
desse milharal, pois ele pertence ao indivíduo que o está imaginando. Este
universo foi criado na imaginação de Brahma, a Entidade Suprema, por isso
a propriedade deste universo é de Brahma, e não dos microcosmos que também
foram criados pela imaginação de Brahma. Nenhuma propriedade deste mundo,
mutável ou imutável, pertence a um indivíduo em particular; tudo é o
patrimônio comum de todos."
Restante do texto em
http://cirandas.net/brauliobo/blog/a-problematica-de-hoje-em-dia
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