Re: [Caml-list] About contributions to the Standard Library

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 7:08 AM, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>
wrote:

> But then you should ask for more workers, not for more work.
>

Very true, and we do!

We've always repeatedly claimed that reviewing proposed patches/changes
would be a big help. Some external contributors frequently do it and it is
very useful. (It is particularly useful when they're ready to go to the
level of a code review, but feedback on the design is already useful.)

For a concrete example, the email I sent to announce that we would accept
pull-requests on Github, in addition to patches on Mantis (
https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2014-01/msg00254.html ), starts
as follows:

I think we need more people ready to review patches proposed for
> inclusion in the OCaml compiler/distribution; lack of reviews is
> currently one of the bottleneck in the development process -- among
> others, such as the sheer difficulty to reach consensus on any change
> to the language itself. Doing patch reviews is helpful, extremely
> interesting, and an excellent way to get to know more about small
> parts of the compiler.
>

To repeat again: any help reviewing proposed patches, on *both* Mantis and
Github, is warmly welcome. It's an excellent way to get to know diverse
parts of the compiler distribution codebase, it's informative, low-risk,
interesting, very helpful. Do it!

That should, of course, not prevent us from un-blocking a situation with
the compiler stdlib, where people interested in also improving its state
(such as you) were prevented from contributing by lack of clear upstream
guidance on the range of accepted changes and the decision process. We want
more reviews *and* more good stuff, and we should have both.

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 7:08 AM, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>
wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 09:21:11AM -0400, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
> > Well there are more tickets on the bugtracker (and github PRs) than human
> > time to review and make decisions on all of them. I'm very sorry if some
> > contributions are left to bitrot. Anyone can help by reviewing and giving
> > informed opinions on suggestions, and it's most helpful if contributors
> are
> > ready to ping from time to time to ask for an opinion on their
> contribution.
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 7:19 AM, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Am Montag, den 27.06.2016, 11:09 +0200 schrieb Goswin von Brederlow:
> > > > Why should we contribute when contibutions are just left to bitrot?
> > > >
> > > > Like: http://caml.inria.fr/mantis/view.php?id=4909 which has had a
> > > > patch for 6 1/2 year that's just left rotting.
> > >
> > > I guess you hit one of the pain points of the current library design,
> > > namely the various integer types (and the issue of combinatorial
> > > increase of possible variants). In my most recent code (a data science
> > > lib) I solved that radically - no support for 32 bit architectures
> > > anymore. The truth is that with current OCaml you cannot support both
> 32
> > > bit and 64 bit equally well. Either you get a performance loss from
> > > boxed ints, or you get macros in central places of your code.
> > >
> > > Of course, that's no excuse for not responding at all.
> > >
> > > Gerd
>
> But then you should ask for more workers, not for more work.
>
> If you already can't keep up with the existing rate of contributions
> then more contributions will only mean more are left to bitrot. Worse,
> it means less contribution do get added because you spend more time
> just checking new contributions and deciding to not handle them right
> now.
>
> But anyway, consider this a ping for my patch. Hopefully it will be
> looked at again now.
>
> MfG
>         Goswin
>
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