Commit sluts
Admit it, you know the sort. You’re involved in some kind of foolish open source project, you’re desperate for young fresh blood in the shape of eager users who want to contribute.
Lo and behold, you do find these users! They come in, they submit a few patches. The patches look sensible, nothing stunning or brilliant, but robust and sturdy and certainly valuable (for some value of valuable) to the project overall.
So, the project maintainer accepts these patches, and at some point, the person who submitted these mediocre patches pipes up with a request to become a committer.
This is pretty much all the warning a mature project maintainer needs in order to never give commit access to this person.
Surely they earned it, I hear you naive fools scream out. Sadly, this is far from the truth. The reality is that they are part of a new breed of developers known as commit sluts. These people have no particular interest or loyalty to any given project. Their sole purpose in life seems to be to wriggle their way onto the developers list of as many projects as possible.
On the surface of it, that isn’t such a bad thing. So what if they commit to 20 other projects too? Well, the problem isn’t when you first give them commit rights. They’ll be happy and submit a token patch or two. However, once you give them that which they crave above all else, they simply lose interest. If you’re lucky, they’ll commit the odd pointless change once every few weeks (usually with changlog messages like ‘improved layout’, ‘fixed imports’, ‘clarified description’, ‘corrected javadocs’), but realistically, as far as the project is concerned, they’re done. They’ve now moved on to their next hapless victim, who they will seduce with their honeyed words and seductive patches. Once they pierce through the developer requirement barrier and defile that holy list, their conquest is complete, they can move on and sow their filthy dirty seeds elsewhere.
So, how to project against this new evil menace to decent society? The answer is deceptively simple. Just say no. Anyone who asks for commit access, just say no. Nobody who asks or begs for it deserves it.
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:08 pm
You are all going to hell you fat bastards!
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:18 pm
Got anyone in mind Hani ? Speaking from OpenSymphony experience maybe ?
C’mon! Name names!
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:19 pm
Is there a top ten list of commit sluts?
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:25 pm
I have migrated OSWorkflow to the Maven build environment. Please give me CVS so I can commit me changes.
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:33 pm
Ouch…. Straight through the heart.. Et tu, hani?
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:42 pm
Perhaps the OpenSymphony folks could use some more committers, considering the slow pace at which they churn out shitty software.
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:43 pm
Perhaps the OpenSymphony folks could use some more committers, considering the slow pace at which they churn out shitty software.
December 22nd, 2003 at 3:56 pm
Please explain the victim part.
At what point did they actually do damage?
If you are worried about these people —>
Perhaps their commit access can expire after a point in time. Also, I think it is okay for different people to have different levels of “commitment”.
Sometimes people are just looking to add their feature. Once the project does everything they want it to do, whats the big deal if they sit idle and just do support?
I do think it is important not to try not to spread yourself too thin. I find it very hard to support more than 3-4 projects.
However, could you please bile the “dead project admins”? Sometimes a tool looks exciting, and a developer may join up with a project only to find the admin himself does not share the same level of commitment/interest. I think it is “OKAY” to loose interest if the admin(s) always takes 5 or more days to repond to questions(or does not respond at all). It can be fustrating if you are are still waiting for the correct cvs access, or you never hear back if they want to proceed on a feature.
If that is the cause, join a competitive project or start your own.
December 23rd, 2003 at 4:36 am
They do damage because they waste other people’s time (project admin’s as well as other developers).
That time involves voting for the new committer, usually website fanfare, irc regarding how good for the project would be to have him/her on board, etc. etc. All this usually just for < 100 lines of code that any other committer could do in no time.
The bileblogger has a point here.
December 23rd, 2003 at 6:46 am
Nah, he’s just pissed off because he’s not made it to project admin on OpenSymphony yet and JiraMikeJira has.
December 23rd, 2003 at 8:12 am
Surely calling them a slut is implying that they will sleep with anyone.
Hani, I’m not sure that applying for commit access to OpenSymphony means that they want to sleep with you.
December 23rd, 2003 at 8:56 am
Grouch Marx said something like “I would not join any club that would have me as a member”…
December 23rd, 2003 at 1:07 pm
Heh. I kind of did this with JavaCC. I’m going to commit something more than “stuff PMD found” real soon. No, really! Gack.
A possible solution is a “committers emeritus” page, i.e.:
http://pmd.sourceforge.net/credits.html
This lets you clean up inactive committers without making anyone feel bad.
December 23rd, 2003 at 2:39 pm
I’ve updated all of the opensympany source for copyright of new year 4002. May I please have commit rights to check it in?
December 23rd, 2003 at 2:40 pm
I respect people that get out of developers lists, even of “famous” (positive or neagtive is up to the reader) ones like Jboss, like Rickard.
December 23rd, 2003 at 2:44 pm
Ive been on a SourceForge project for the last 6 months, and I’m now an Admin. When I started there were 19 people with commit rights. During the last 6 months, 14 of them have done nothing … not one commit between them, not one item mail on the mailing list, or entry on the Forums. So I’ve just had the pleasure to remove their commit rights :-)
Adios Coños
December 23rd, 2003 at 6:02 pm
Rickard is a Swedish socialist slut.
December 24th, 2003 at 4:07 am
Why does this remind me of people from the following list?
- IRC OP Sluts
- Forum Mod Sluts
- Website Newsmaster Sluts
- Collective-Blog Posters Sluts
- Blog Comments-Writers Sluts
- Usenet Top-(innumbersofposts)-Posters Sluts
- Spammers
Am I alone?
December 25th, 2003 at 8:15 pm
I resemble a commit slut, and it bugs me.
December 26th, 2003 at 7:09 pm
Come on Hani just give me commit access and I won’t have to bother you so much!
January 9th, 2004 at 6:07 am
I think that projects need to have more levels then just contributor and committer. After all, we all know that while all committers are equal, some are more equal then others for good reasons. Often people come into a project with a specific itch to scratch. They want to solve a problem, commit a feature, and then move on. I would love to be able to specify that I want commit privileges to this branch of the tree, or for 2 months to accomplish this issue. And if the adminstrative crap can be kept to a minimum, this would work. If committer X says I can work in this portion of the project for 2 months, then bingo! It’s done. But, after a while, doing some commits, that is when it really becomes appropriate to bump up the access for the new quasi-committer via a vote or whatnot to the mailing list.
Patch’s are very cumbersome to work through, and make it hard for the older committers to really judge a person. Instead, give them commit is a small portion of the project and see what they do!