The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 12:54 UTC (Thu) by dunlapg (guest, #57764)
In reply to: The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit by marcH
Parent article: The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Of course, life is too short. Why is it so hard to do this consciously considering it's already common place anyway for sheer lack of time?

My guess is that Peter feels obligated, by his position as maintainer, to continue to review all submitted patches -- including those from people who continually ignore his feedback; and thus the only available option he sees for responding to that situation is to escalate to attacking the person. Being given a better pattern of response ("This is the third time you've sent patches with this code pattern. From now on, I will review no more than one series from you per month, and I will stop immediately when I see an issue I have commented on previously") which is neither personal nor undue effort for the maintainer goes a long way towards reducing maintainer frustration.

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The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Oct 25, 2018 17:56 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link] (1 responses)

My guess is that Peter feels obligated, by his position as maintainer, to continue to review all submitted patches -- including those from people who continually ignore his feedback

Eh, I think your obligation is to the project, not to random difficult contributors.

I don't know, it's hard to discuss in the abstract. The intersection of "capable of providing some value to the project" and "completely ignores clear feedback" sounds rather small, and I'm not thinking of any examples.

The more frequent case is that it's one of those technical disputes where people are just talking past each other. And in that case it's easy to get caught up in the back and forth and fail to understand something the other person's saying, and regardless of which one's in the right, both often come away with the impression that the other is intentionally refusing to listen, even though that's not exactly what's going on.

I really think the best you can do in that case sometimes is just to drop the subject, and if they ignore clear requests to do that, at some point it's more effective just to stop responding.

The code of conduct at the Maintainers Summit

Posted Nov 1, 2018 8:49 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> The more frequent case is that it's one of those technical disputes where people are just talking past each other.

"Just listen to what I'm actually saying, not what you're hearing". You need a 3rd-party to step in and moderate, and say "this is the real issue".

That's one of my big bug-bears in normal life too - people assume they know what I'm going to say, and never wait for me to say it (when actually, I'm usually going to say something rather different ...)

Cheers,
Wol