[PD] "list foreach"?

[Jonathan Wilkes]

Hi Chris,
     That's all great advice in general.  But then there's this thread in particular, where at least two perfectly capable developers chose to advocate for a trivial feature to be added to Pd rather than taking 10 minutes to implement it and make a "small, clean, self contained patch" as you suggest.  Why do you think that is?

In the meantime I'll continue doing exactly the healthy development process you describe, in Pd-l2ork.

-Jonathan


On Thursday, October 9, 2014 11:18 PM, Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:
 


On 09/10/14 22:51, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:
> <sigh>... One could argue that
 those using a pd-fork would benefit, and
> just maybe if vanilla contributors felt compelled to do so, they could
> also borrow code and implement it in their version as well?

I'm confused, is this a pull request?

In my experience the most effective way to get code merged into an open
source project is as follows:

* Make a small, clean, self contained patch that changes as little of
the codebase as possible to accomplish a goal.

* Format your code to match the style of the codebase it is going in to.

* Advocate for the patch directly with the maintainer and on the
mailing list. In the past "lots of people have requested this feature"
has worked for me as a lobbying point.

* If changes are suggested by the maintainer, address them and resubmit.

* Accept that some patches simply won't go in. In that case you are of
course welcome to fork, or to maintain the patch in a parallel branch.

* Don't be a dick. I'm happy to note that the era of Pd-powered
missiles seems to be over. Good riddance!

Here is someone smarter than me writing in more depth on this subject:

http://people.redhat.com/rjones/how-to-supply-code-to-open-source-projects/#patches

Of course, Pd-l2ork is a fork and you are obviously welcome to do
whatever you want. What I don't think
 is
 constructive is implying that
Miller should be traipsing through the Pd-l2ork codebase and cherry
picking stuff he likes out and doing the work to merge those changes
cleanly into Pd. Just think about how you'd react if someone forked
Pd-l2ork, made monolithic changes to the codebase, and then asked you to
go through it and find stuff you might like to merge back into Pd-l2ork.

Traditionally in open source projects that isn't the way that software
gets patched. Traditionally, a community of developers tries to submit
patches to a maintainer and lobbies for their acceptance. We are all
very busy and that seems to be the most effective way to get code merged.

Let me re-iterate again that you have every right not to do this, and
your fork is an
 amazing piece of work, and I wish you good luck and much
genuine respect for what you guys have created. *If* you or anybody else
wants patches to go into Miller's Pd though, then they need to do the
proper work of trying to get them in there. Our community seems to not
be great at this process and I don't know why that is. I do think it's
something we can fix on an individual level however.

Let me now attempt to demonstrate with [list foreach]. [1]

Tooooooooltiiiiiiiips,

Chris.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y_Jp6PxsSQ#t=19

-- 
http://mccormick.cx/


_______________________________________________
Pd-list at lists.iem.at mailing list
UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/attachments/20141009/d77adceb/attachment-0001.html>