On Thu, September 28, 2006 9:24 am, Chris Morgan wrote:
I'm of the opinion that code is "art" as its implementation is subjective. The idea that you could document when a patch is acceptable or not seems like an impossibility.
I wholeheartedly subscribe to this. We are far away (as a profession) to document what is a good/bad patch even when that is fairly obvious to a good maintainer, let alone document exactly the thought process for more complicated cases.
This is a waste of time. Alexandre is an amazing judge of patches, we should be happy we have him. More to the point, I think this is missing the point. If we are good at something, it is in evaluating patches on their techincal merit. This doesn't need improvement.
What we may be erring a bit is putting the techincal aspects above and beyond other considerations, such as desire for a feature at the expense of a little quality. We are delaying patch inclusion waiting for the 'right' solution, which in part is good, but when that means keeping desired features away for years on end, i think it hurts us more than it helps us being relevant to our users.
Maybe there's a way to help Alexandre better understand how much people want something, maybe that can be factored in a bit?