[Zope-Coders] how are we doing?

[Chris McDonough]

> There is definitely some impedence to committing:
>
>  - being unfamiliar with the setup, I tend to triple-check
everything;
>    therefore even small changes take a while
>
>  - I'm nervous about checking in even tiny bugs without passing them
>    by someone else
>
>  - I spent about an hour doing some STX changes, only to find
Andreas
>    was doing the exact same changes and committed them first!
>
> These factors add up to me feeling like I really need to set aside a
> a large portion of a day even to do a small fix, at the moment.

I know how you feel.  This happens to me all the time.  I tend to be
very careful about what I check in; thus I don't check in very much.
I don't feel that there's anything wrong with this - everyone has his
or her own pace and comfort level.

> The nervous / unfamiliar thing will go over time.  An important
> question: is it good or bad to be extremely cautious?  Would it
> perhaps be better to have more mistakes but a higher turnaround of
> fixes?  Would you guys like to see more fixes happening
unilaterally?

I think it's extremely good to be careful.  If this means that there
is only a little activity, but that activity is solid, I think that
it's a good thing.

I was worried about not seeing *any* checkins from 80% of the folks,
but it seems that I've just not been subscribed to the right lists.

> I entirely agree that the collector should help focus these issues.
> I'd like to see ZC nominate some minor areas of Zope for which the
> outside commiters can assume full responsibility, and then channel
> these via the Collector.

This gets to the heart of the "ownership" question.  Responsibilities
for areas of the code are going to need to be better defined before we
can really crank on this open committer thing, IMHO.  Most things
don't have owners right now, so there's nobody to say what's wrong and
what's right; which is demoralizing for folks both internal and
external.

- C