4 ms·

How does the merge setting solve the complete lack of any useful information in the pull request?

sanderjd 3y ago
Your comments here should go in the textbook for "why people often prefer to work in private for awhile while zeroing in on their processes for a new endeavor". There will always be someone who will gleefully jump down your throat for imperfections. But on balance it's probably better to work in public anyway and ignore the haters (while also continuously improving processes).
- Foxboron 3y ago
  Most people don't spend this much time on PR before releasing their fork though. If they had worked on this publicly from the start I'm sure a lot of the current PRs would have generally been of better quality as they could get community input earlier.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Oh I see now! Your comments about the merits of the pull requests are just bad faith; you're actually making this totally different point about the project that has absolutely nothing to do with squashing or commit messages. Thanks for clearing that up.
    - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
      It was definitely not bad faith. They're pointing out that OpenTF isn't bothering to hold to quality standards that Hashicorp had for Terraform before the fork and they aren't trying to raise beyond those standards to reach the levels common in higher quality community projects like Linux, Kubernetes, LibreOffice, and OBS Studio. A project being run by professional developers who have a lot of experience working with the Terraform code should be capable of doing this.
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Well, I disagree that it's not bad faith. If your problem with a project is that it advertised itself to its target audience prior to releasing a repository, then a good faith comment would say something like, "My problem with this project is that they have spent more time writing manifestos and blog posts and social media comments so far than they have spent developing strong processes and working on publishing a repository for the project". But if that's your real problem with a project, then a bad faith comment might look like "This is a bad pull request, how could you let it get merged?". The reason that is in bad faith is that it says nothing about your actual problem with the project, it's just a totally random swipe that you don't even actually care about. If there turns out to be a good answer to the question, like "Oh you're right, we forgot to require squashing pull requests when merging, I've fixed it now!", then instead of recognizing that your complaint has been spoken to, you are likely to simply find further things to criticize, because the first thing wasn't actually your real criticism, it was just a smokescreen. Now, if you are making this other, better, point that the OpenTF project should have more mature software development practices, at least equivalent to and ideally exceeding the better-known project they have forked from, then yep, I agree with that criticism and do not think it is necessarily being made in bad faith. However, I would be significantly more sympathetic to that criticism if it were a comment on an article entitled "OpenTF project celebrates one full year since its conception" rather than one entitled "OpenTF repository is now public". The project is brand new, and they clearly rushed to get out a public repository because of other haters who were giving them crap about taking too long to publish the repository, and their processes clearly haven't matured yet. (Or I dunno, maybe it was even many of the same haters, because again, this is the tendency with people who criticize in bad faith, to just move on to the next random criticism that they don't actually care about.) So if we get to a year from now and their processes remain immature, then yep, I'm right there with you on your criticism. But I think it's crazy (and, sorry to keep repeating myself: likely in bad faith) to make this criticism of such a new project. There is absolutely no indication that the developers running the project are incapable of having mature processes for the project, from the tiny amount of data available from the tiny amount of time that has elapsed since they announced the project.
        Conan_Kudo 3y ago

Your comments here should go in the textbook for "why people often prefer to work in private for awhile while zeroing in on their processes for a new endeavor". There will always be someone who will gleefully jump down your throat for imperfections. But on balance it's probably better to work in public anyway and ignore the haters (while also continuously improving processes).

Foxboron 3y ago
Most people don't spend this much time on PR before releasing their fork though. If they had worked on this publicly from the start I'm sure a lot of the current PRs would have generally been of better quality as they could get community input earlier.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  Oh I see now! Your comments about the merits of the pull requests are just bad faith; you're actually making this totally different point about the project that has absolutely nothing to do with squashing or commit messages. Thanks for clearing that up.
  - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
    It was definitely not bad faith. They're pointing out that OpenTF isn't bothering to hold to quality standards that Hashicorp had for Terraform before the fork and they aren't trying to raise beyond those standards to reach the levels common in higher quality community projects like Linux, Kubernetes, LibreOffice, and OBS Studio. A project being run by professional developers who have a lot of experience working with the Terraform code should be capable of doing this.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Well, I disagree that it's not bad faith. If your problem with a project is that it advertised itself to its target audience prior to releasing a repository, then a good faith comment would say something like, "My problem with this project is that they have spent more time writing manifestos and blog posts and social media comments so far than they have spent developing strong processes and working on publishing a repository for the project". But if that's your real problem with a project, then a bad faith comment might look like "This is a bad pull request, how could you let it get merged?". The reason that is in bad faith is that it says nothing about your actual problem with the project, it's just a totally random swipe that you don't even actually care about. If there turns out to be a good answer to the question, like "Oh you're right, we forgot to require squashing pull requests when merging, I've fixed it now!", then instead of recognizing that your complaint has been spoken to, you are likely to simply find further things to criticize, because the first thing wasn't actually your real criticism, it was just a smokescreen. Now, if you are making this other, better, point that the OpenTF project should have more mature software development practices, at least equivalent to and ideally exceeding the better-known project they have forked from, then yep, I agree with that criticism and do not think it is necessarily being made in bad faith. However, I would be significantly more sympathetic to that criticism if it were a comment on an article entitled "OpenTF project celebrates one full year since its conception" rather than one entitled "OpenTF repository is now public". The project is brand new, and they clearly rushed to get out a public repository because of other haters who were giving them crap about taking too long to publish the repository, and their processes clearly haven't matured yet. (Or I dunno, maybe it was even many of the same haters, because again, this is the tendency with people who criticize in bad faith, to just move on to the next random criticism that they don't actually care about.) So if we get to a year from now and their processes remain immature, then yep, I'm right there with you on your criticism. But I think it's crazy (and, sorry to keep repeating myself: likely in bad faith) to make this criticism of such a new project. There is absolutely no indication that the developers running the project are incapable of having mature processes for the project, from the tiny amount of data available from the tiny amount of time that has elapsed since they announced the project.
      - Conan_Kudo 3y ago