[haiku-inc] Re: Contract communication
- From: "Michael Lotz" <mmlr@xxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-inc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:12:00 +0200
Hi all
I'm just picking this message for replying. Sorry for the overlong
read, conclusion at the end of the message...
Patrik Gissberg <patrik@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Maybe someone could volunteer to repost/summarize michael's commits
> > to
> > the general
> > mailing list or submit it as a blog post.
> That is a very good idea. Blog/news should be preferred over
> mailing-list since I believe that a lot more people visit the
> homepage
> than the mailing-lists.
I hear you. I've been meaning to do a blog post pretty much from the
start, but I kept myself from doing so with a feeling of "it's just
missing this or that bit to make much more sense". Eventually I got
stuck with a dependency or got side-tracked by a workflow blocking
issue that I deemed was worth investigating and now we're here without
a single blog post. I'm not proud of that and I don't intend to defend
or excues that with the following. I'm merely pointing out some facts
so that things can be viewed in the right perspective.
As has been mentioned by others the thing about commits is kind of
difficult. This has come up also during discussions about how to judge
someone's contribution level. A raw commit count isn't a very good
measurement there, because the amount of time/work spent to understand
a problem and fix it does not really corelate to commit counts/lines
changed. It's kind of frustrating actually, looking at hours of
tracking something down and seeing a single line commit going out as a
fix... With regards to commit message quality, I try really hard to
make them as precise and explanatory as possible, so I sure hope this
isn't an issue.
A general note to make as well is simply that we are kind of stable. We
sure have loads of bugs still present, but as we've worked on the system
for years, finding the remaining ones has gotten increasingly complex
as they tend to be more subtle. Reproducing issues in rarely used code
paths can be a pain, etc. I also think that it simply makes sense for
me to work on more complex problems, ones that do actually take more
time to investigate and therefore ones that other contributors, not
having the luxury of a contract, often simply don't have the time to
work on. PR wise this is horrible of course, as I cannot do much more
than simply say "it literally took me 3 hours to figure this one-liner
out". It's most certainly not as flashy as implementing a new driver or
component that tends to bring tens/hundreds of commits in rapid
succession...
Then there is the question of the medium. I realize that most donors
quite probably aren't reading the commits list, bug tracker
notifications or IRC logs, so I'm kind of off radar. Blogs are a form
of communication that I don't usually use. In my opinion a blog post
should have a certain length and be of a certain (high) quality, it is
to me what an article in a newspaper would be. Once I sit down to
actually do a blog post it therefore does take me quite a lot of time
to come up with something that satisfies this standard. While I am sure
that many would appreciate regular high quality blog posts, I am not
convinced that writing them is a very effective use of my contract
time. Therefore doing such posts more than weekly isn't really an option
IMO. Especially so since they would then most probably consist only of
"still working on this, that and that" half of the time.
As mentioned above I've run into the trap of getting distracted before
finishing some area of work and completing it with a blog post. I bought
a new laptop to be more efficient working on Haiku, now that I do it on
contract. This required me to do some driver work to get set up for
example... I realize in retrospect that this would've probably made a
nice topic for a blog post on it's own just so that people understand
where things are coming from. To some degree distractions will always
happen for me though, if only for the simple fact that working on the
same component/problem for an extended period of time tends to get me
frustrated and I need to get some motivation using some "lower hanging
fruit" (doing a blog post in such situations is something I just realize
now).
> I have not said that Michael is the one that must keep us informed.
> That
> is also why I post to Haiku, Inc's mailing-list and not directly to
> Michael.
When working on Haiku (and usually also otherwise) I am available in
IRC. This often leads to helping out other devs and/or the other way
around. And quite often this also leads to intermediate status updates
for interested people where I tell them what's going on right now on my
end. This kind of satisfied my "give status updates"-feeling, while I
obviously realize that this isn't very helpful to most people who don't
happen to hang around an IRC channel the whole day...
In either case I'll try to come up with some balance of shorter status
updates and regular, more elaborate blog posts. If so desired, I could
also make my timetracking available publically (it's a homegrown PHP
based "solution", so it's online anyway). I do keep pretty exact track
of the time I actually spend and usually do make comments to further
differentiate the nature of what got worked on, so this might be
interesting for donors to see.
Regards
Michael
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