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Re: svn commit: r1875921 - in /subversion/trunk: subversion/include/ subversion/include/private/ subversion/libsvn_fs_fs/ subversion/svnadmin/ subversion/tests/cmdline/ subversion/tests/libsvn_fs_fs/ tools/client-side/

From: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2020 11:03:42 +0200

On Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 01:08:05AM +0000, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> Daniel Shahaf wrote on Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:05 +00:00:
> > Stefan Sperling wrote on Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:58 +00:00:
> > > If it makes you feel any better, I'd be happy to stop voluteering for the
> > > RM role, and let you or someone else worry about the release going forward.
> >
> > I won't dignify this petulant threat with a response. Feel free to
> > rephrase yourself. (And lest you mistake the previous sentence for [...])
>
> To be clear: I'm still interested in resolving this issue; however,
> I can't even begin to debug it unless you give me not only the error
> message but also the backtrace.
>
> I'm listening.

When we ask someone to fix something, that means we are always asking for
some amount of effort to be spent at the receiving end of our message.
And of course, there is also some effort spent in formulating the request
in the first place.
This in itself is not a problem. It is simply part of working in a group.

Problems happens when the perceived(!) effort at either side gets out of
balance. "Perceived effort" because I don't know much effort you really
spent reviewing my patch. All I see is the message you send me afterwards.

It is easy to scroll over a patch and find small inaccuracies and mistakes.
Especially when we have a project rule book which tells us what inaccuracies
to look uot for. When the book says things like "functions have docstrings"
that means any commit which doesn't conform to this rule can be criticized
by the book. But that doesn't always mean that we should. Context matters.

What our rule book cannot know is the how much effort we are willing to
put into conforming to it, and the trade-offs we make because of that.

So when I asked Denis to fix a buildbot issue, I didn't ask him to do
things which I would not be willing to do myself if necessary.

When you asked me to write and backport docstrings, I tried to communicate
to you that's a bit too much effort for me. And you told me to do it anyway.

When I point out that I don't believe docstrings are as important as other
things on the plate, that means I am close to my effort limit. If you then
push harder and harder to get the result you want, what natually happens
is that I get frustrated with the work we are trying to do together.
Received on 2020-04-02 11:03:56 CEST

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