Re: [Caml-list] Recent hooks design and general github PR issues

[Alain Frisch <alain.frisch@lexifi.com>]

On 19/07/2016 17:08, Yotam Barnoy wrote:
> It may also be worthwhile to say that except for rare exceptions
> (mostly bug fixes), PRs should not be merged by the same person who
> authored them, as this makes the process seem biased and questionable.

Open source projects have leaders (Xavier and Damien, for OCaml), and 
other core maintainers with more decision power than the community.  And 
in the community, the opinions of some people have more weight than 
those of others.  Of course, the process is biased!

But compare to the situation before the switch to Git and GitHub: new 
developments were almost always pushed/committed by the author if they 
had commit rights, sometimes discussed (well, usually evoked) on 
caml-devel before, and even less often on Mantis.

The new situation is much more open and the level of review has 
increased significantly.  When someone with commit rights submits a PR, 
this is more community-friendly than pushing directly to trunk (which is 
not forbidden, and still happens), even if the same person finally does 
the merge after taking comments (from everyone) into account.  Possibly 
nobody feels like commenting, reviewing, nor endorsing the proposal; 
this is not ideal, but I don't think this should prevent merging after a 
reasonable amount of time, preferably also after mentioning the imminent 
merge.


Alain