Defining specific problems and handwaving at solutions (was Re: What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andrew Bennetts writes:
 > sjt wrote:

 > > No, in many cases that would just inhibit the initial contribution,
 > > rather than having it abandoned after one round.  The problem is that
 > 
 > It's true that some people will just want to fire and forget a
 > patch.  However my experience has been that many people (and
 > perhaps most of them?  Citation needed...) are happy to iterate[.]

Agreed; most of my problems with the fire-and-forget type are senior
committers....<wink>

However ... people who are happy to iterate, and even ask for
guidance, usually are already aware of the conversational nature of
such processes.  So the *specific* recommendation you made (describing
the conversation) is unlikely to improve submission and acceptance
rates, or lag to landing, *unless* it is described as (and actually
*is*, of course) a mentoring process.  That's all I mean to say.

 > (Obviously we lack a mentoring process at the moment, so I guess
 > I'll comment that part out for the moment.)

But you don't lack a mentoring process.  What you lack is a *formal*
(ie, publicly known) and *reliable* one.  Surely mentoring goes on all
the time (for example, because of the general interest of the Bazaar
developers in TDD, Maritza's experiments in that direction are not
only getting attention, but lots of approval and advice -- what is
that, if not "mentoring"?)  The thing is, currently mentoring depends
on the interests and biases of the senior developers; new contributors
whose ideas or methods don't fit feel a lukewarm reception, even
though you "encourage" their contributions.

Something that just occurred to me is that non-committers and non-core
people probably are not at all aware of how long some projects that
committers propose languish in the queue, too.  I don't think it's
good PR to belabor that in public, but one thing a good mentoring
process would do is give senior contributors an appropriate place to
tell their war stories of The Patch That Took A Decade To Land. :-)