Re: [PATCH 0/4] remote-hg: more improvements

Philippe Vaucher [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Basically you have to write in a manner "if a seedy stranger gave me
that code on a street corner, I would have no problem checking it
in".  In practice, the shortcuts offering themselves through civil
behavior and mutual trust get a lot more work done.

My point was more that it's very hard to produce high quality commits
without social interaction with others explaining what you missed,
stuffs you overlooked, etc.

You are overgeneralizing.  You are assuming that it's easier for
everybody to interact with humans rather than the Tao of Computing.

And there B issues quickly isolate you.

Unless you were isolated to start with.

Anyway, I think we are speaking about different things. All I'm saying
is that humans are social creatures and that thinking you can
contribute to projects ran by humans without according a high
importance to social behaviors (like Felipe thinks) is not possible.

You are assuming that "according a high importance to social behaviors"
is all that it takes for anybody.  Do you tell the beggar on the next
street corner that "according a high importance to earning millions"
would be all that would be necessary for him to afford anything to drink
that he'd like?

Threads like this are proof that while technical quality might be
important for the short term, social behaviors is impossible to ignore
in the long term.

Not really.

Both are very important to be an appreciated contributor, or to
contribute at all in the long term.

The one thing where social behavior comes in is noticing who tends to be
running free software projects.

There is the mythical "scratching one's itch" theory, but it does not
fit the bill.  Those people who invest enough time into a project's
progress to make a fundamental difference tend to do it at the cost of
not having any worthwhile amount of time left actually _using_ the
product.

People mainly working on music software create very little music
themselves, people mainly working on text processing software do not
write many texts themselves, people writing high-performance operating
systems have very little use for high-performance operating systems
themselves.

All of this might have started at one time as scratching their own itch,
but once their contributions become significant, it's almost always the
itches of others they are scratching, and continue to scratch, feeling
responsible for them due to the skills they have been not as much
blessed or cursed but entrusted with.

And programming and social skills tend to be packaged separately.  So
not everybody is gifted with being able to contribute _gracefully_.

-- 
David Kastrup

quoted

My point was more that it's very hard to produce high quality commits
without social interaction with others explaining what you missed,
stuffs you overlooked, etc.

You are overgeneralizing.  You are assuming that it's easier for
everybody to interact with humans rather than the Tao of Computing.

No, what I'm saying is that most non-trivial patches go through a
review process involving human interactions. It is very hard to
produce a very good non-trivial patch without going through human
interactions, just because someone might ask a question about your
patch. To be honest I'm not interested in fighting over this so let's
agree to disagree.

quoted

Anyway, I think we are speaking about different things. All I'm saying
is that humans are social creatures and that thinking you can
contribute to projects ran by humans without according a high
importance to social behaviors (like Felipe thinks) is not possible.

You are assuming that "according a high importance to social behaviors"
is all that it takes for anybody.  Do you tell the beggar on the next
street corner that "according a high importance to earning millions"
would be all that would be necessary for him to afford anything to drink
that he'd like?

I'm sorry that my words aren't clear enough for you to infer the point
I'm trying to make. Let's try something simpler: what I was saying is
that bad behavior will get you into trouble when contributing (and
thus it's important to behave nicely), where Felipe usualy says bad
behavior is irrelevant because only truth/quality is important.

And programming and social skills tend to be packaged separately.  So
not everybody is gifted with being able to contribute _gracefully_.

Yes it's unfortunate. The amount of talent in our societies that is
wasted because of communication problems is probably quite high. I
didn't find a way around "being social" in any human based community
yet, but if you have an idea please share. The only way I can see
working is that for someone to act as a mediator between the grumpy
contributor and the community, but the role of this person is not very
pleasant. That or maybe have merges done by some kind of robot with
some AI about patch quality, but I doubt it is technically feasible
yet.

Philippe