View on project leadership and failures....

[tridge at samba.org]

Jerry,

 > True.  I'll admit it. I learned that from Jeremy btw... :-)
 > but the fact is that very little code that comes in
 > from external sources takes everything into account.
 > If anything our major fault is fixing things when we
 > should push back and and say "fix this and that....
 > then we'll accept it into the tree".  And I think this goes
 > back to (a) not wanting to risk loosing a needed feature,
 > and (b) checking in incomplete things ourselves.

This is a key point I think. I remember Linus pointing out that one of
the things he liked about bk (and now git), is that it doesn't
encourage (or even allow?) for pulls where you edit the code the
person supplies. You can pull and then do your own commit to cleanup
the code, but the tools really encourage rejecting code if you don't
like it, and waiting for the submitter to fix it to the point you are
happy with it.

It would be a huge change for us to work like this though. It is
arguably a worthwhile change, as it would strongly push us into a
system where we train up submitters to produce code that we find
acceptable, but it would (at least in the short term) increase our
workload, as its so often easier to just fix code than to explain in
sufficient detail why it isn't acceptable as-is.

Cheers, Tridge