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Postings from May 2013
On 24 May 2013 12:42, Nicholas Clark <nick@ccl4.org> wrote: > On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:05:51PM +0200, demerphq wrote: >> On 24 May 2013 11:34, Peter Rabbitson <rabbit-p5p@rabbit.us> wrote: > >> > Whereas the s/80/100/ patch says: "Ah sod it - it doesn't matter. If >> > someone wants to have this - they can fix it all in one step at some >> > future point. But for the time being I refuse to crowdsource work which >> > I find useless anyway". >> >> IMO its not crowdsourcing, it is misusing the most scarce resource we >> have (competent C programmers who know the core) for something that >> others can do just as well. > > As one of the scarse resources I agree the initial reasoning that it's not > the best use of time. > > But I think that taking this approach would be flawed. The problem is that > it relies on having other *volunteers* to clean up. "Hey, come volunteer > to help with the Perl core. Do you know C? Oh, OK, have fun with all these > menial tasks". A volunteer project is completing on the basis of "fun", and > deciding that new recruits and "unskilled" labour gets all the unfun tasks > is going to result in many of the other volunteers stopping. Which in the > end means that the C programmers *also* have to do all the other jobs, > because the two-tier system ends up with the other people leaving the > project. I think you leaving out the fact that different people have different ideas of fun. There are people out there willing to write pod patches, etc. We see patches from them fairly regularly. So long as we treat them with the same respect that we afford C hackers I think this is less of a problem than it might be. > If we had a ready supply of people keen to do these sort of tasks (and > actually *do* them, not just say they were interested and then wander > off), then it would be different. But we don't, and I don't think that > this is going to change. I think often we are poor at supporting these people. On at least one occasion we have more or less stood by while they were flamed out of our community. > > Also, I don't like it because it isn't leading from the front. It isn't > "walking the walk". It's "do as I say, not as I do". I'm happy to lead from the front regarding things I think are important. (Security, speed, etc). But not for things that I think are waste of time. There is no intrinsic value to things like POD line length restrictions except to those who insist on using screen geometries from twenty years ago. That's their choice, yet they want the rest of us to do the work. Refusing to do so is not a failure of leadership. On the contrary. > The bigger still problem that I don't have an answer for is I can't see > how to make *any* sort of "volunteering on the core" more fun. A lot of the > usual "fun" reasons just don't work. For example, it's great that v5.18.0 > shipped, but it's completely outside of our control as to when anyone will > deploy it. And if no-one uses it, where's the fun in that? Like I said, different folks have different definitions of fun. :-) But i expect uptake to be pretty good. Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"Thread Previous | Thread Next