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Re: [eclipse-pmc] Should we accept any patches to attract more contributors?

Hi Andrey,

thanks for asking for clarification on the process.

Cleanup work is usually important for new contributors. When you
started to contribute to platform UI most all of your first 10
contributions were cleanup commits. Some of them affected highly the
Git blame functionality. See
https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/q/owner:loskutov%2540gmx.de+status:merged+project:platform/eclipse.platform.ui,410
for the list and
https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/38634/13/bundles/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/Eclipse+UI/org/eclipse/ui/internal/Perspective.java
for one of your changes. In this phase, I reviewed and accepted your
patches despite the feedback that this would be bad for comparison
(see https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=456729#c4 for such
a comment). It is hard to say, what would happen if your cleanup
patches were rejected but I assume your desire to contribute would
have been negatively impacted by this. Now you are one of our best
developers. And you started with cleanup work.

So my position in the PMC is clear, cleanup patches are important to
grow the community and hence must have priority about preserving the
history.

I like to add a quote from your discussion with the contributor:
https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/132436/

----------------------------Feedback from the
contributor-------------------------
That (not accepting cleanup patches) effectively prevents any
refactoring. When I run blame on our codebase, most times a line was
last changed because someone indented it by wrapping an if around it.
That you can't get to the original change with one blame seems natural
to me in an old codebase.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best regards, Lars
On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 10:35 AM Andrey Loskutov <loskutov@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Please see discussion on https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/132436/ and also on https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/131015/.
> I've rejected patch https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/132436/ with -2 and voted -1 on https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/131015/.
>
> At the end I was asked to bring the issue "how/what the project should value more" to PMC.
> I guess Alex wanted to ask is we should not "down vote" patches to have more contributors.
>
> My point on the gerrit was that mass change patches without functional changes (or with questionable changes) are not acceptable because they make code maintenance harder due broken git blame.
> I've made this -2 and -1 not because it is a matter of taste from me, which code style is better or not, but because code maintenance is also about understanding the history of the code, which is interrupted forever by such mass changes.
>
> I observe the results of such patches in Platform UI project, which had numerous *non-functional* "code cleanups" behind it and now it is impossible to use git blame on affected code.
> So all what I want is just to keep git history clean from non functional mass changes. I do not see how accepting non functional mass changes can attract more people.
>
> Kind regards,
> Andrey Loskutov
>
> Спасение утопающих - дело рук самих утопающих
>
> http://google.com/+AndreyLoskutov
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-- 
Eclipse Platform project co-lead
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