Hi, > Code reivew at a company is very different from code review for some > open source project on a forge. If someone is a new college grad > working at my company, (a) I know that they were above the hiring bar, > and (b) I know that they are likely going to be around in the future, > so the time and investment in training them via doing a code review is > more likely to have a positive return on investment. > > When someone I've never seen before sends me a pull request on github, > neither (a) nor (b) are guaranteed to be true. > > I'll also note that at my company, we generally assign a mentor to > each new hire, and the manager and the tech lead very carefully pick a > "starter project" to set up the new hire for success. > > Perhaps the best analog for this in the open source world are programs > such as Google Summer of Code or an Outreachy Internship. So if > someone wants to have the goal of being more welcoming to newcomers, > perhaps that person should consider setting up similar programs in > Debian. This is far more likely to be successful than demanding that > Debian Maintainers who are volunteers (not employees of a company) > spend their volunteer time doing the work that someone else wants to > have done. Open source means you get to volunteer your effort to a > common goal; not that you get to demand that others people volunteer > their effort towards your goals.
We all know that "Code reivew at a company is very different from code review for some open source project on a forge." - I don't know if your intent is to be patronizing, but to me what you write above feels like that. In this "debian/watch" thread I asked people to use Merge Requests for their devscript changes. If you look at https://salsa.debian.org/debian/devscripts/-/merge_requests there have been already over 500 MRs and if you read the other messages you should note that both mistakes that "broke" both the changelog and autopkgtests of devscripts slipped in on mainline and was also uploaded to Debian, and both of those could have been easily avoided with MRs submitted by DDs and reviewed by DDs in similar fashion as already had been happening in devscripts for a long time. Your response above is probably also partially to what I wrote in another email thread, specifically: > Please remember to check if your package has open MRs *at least once* before the next upload! I am in fact mentoring two out of the nine GSoC students we have, plus a dozen other new contributors as part of regular mentoring under the Debian mentoring umbrella. One of my GSoC students posted a MR to update a package to the latest version on June 6th, which I reviewed on June 7th and commented on again that my plan is to upload it once Trixie is released. On August 10th another DD pushed updates to the Salsa repository and uploaded it. If that DD had checked at least once if there are open MRs before uploading, we could have avoided a bunch of wasted effort. And there are other cases like this. If people would check MRs at least once before uploading, cases like this could easily be avoided. As a very senior engineer, it would be helpful if you expressed support that checking MRs is good general advice in Debian, and others should do it, even if you personally don't do it. This could help improve the overall culture in Debian that checking MRs is valued, and new contributors publishing their work as branches on Salsa that are visible in MRs in the projects they target is a good thing. Now I am afraid that if half a dozen senior people in Debian write in a negative tone about Merge Requests, new contributors will feel unwelcomed, and also people doing Outreachy, GSoC and regular mentoring will feel that their volunteer time is wasted as their efforts to champion new contributors work gets nullified by people expressing in various ways that MRs are a nuisance and they don't want to have anything to do with them. I hope the above can help you understand my viewpoint better. Also note that I am not a native English speaker and if you read what I write above in some very negative way, you are probably reading it with some cultural lenses that I don't have. Some effort to assume good intentions and that good and correct work has been done and suggestions are valid would be helpful for the next round of messages. - Otto PS. I will try to limit my replies to at most one message per day going forward to follow general advice on how to keep mailing list discussions civil.
