Re: Commitfest problems - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 19/12/14 07:02, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> On 12/18/2014 04:53 AM, Torsten Zuehlsdorff wrote:
>
>>> Having your name in a list of other names at the bottom of the release
>>> notes page, without any indication of what you helped with, would work
>>> better?  Perhaps it would but I tend to doubt it.
>>
>> Out of my personal experience in Germany: yes, it helps. It is not very
>> logical, but many people need a "simple way" (Website against git log)
>> to "see" something.
>>
>> (I've rarely seen that something like that is considered not trustable
>> even if there are strong indications that its faked.)
>>
>> But i think it is a good point that the release notes should not become
>> to big.
>
> I think a lot of hackers forget exactly how tender their egos are. Now 
> I say this knowing that a lot of them will go, "Oh give me a break" 
> but as someone who employs hackers, deals with open source AND normal 
> people :P every single day, I can tell you without a single inch of 
> sarcasm that petting egos is one of the ways you get things done in 
> the open source (and really any male dominated) community.
>
> The problem is, most of our long term contributers don't need to be 
> petted quite so often because they have a long list of: I don't need 
> my ego stroked, do you see the length or value of the contributions I 
> provide? And simply, there are some that just don't care.
>
> However, doing crappy work and let's not be shy about it, there is 
> NOTHING fun about reviewing someone else's code needs to have 
> incentive. Just like when we were kids, we were much more likely to 
> rake the leaves with at least a half smile if we got that extra 10 
> bucks or if we were able to go to that party on Friday.
>
> Finding a way to provide incentive and credit (and they may be the 
> same) will increase the value of the non-self value work of reviewing 
> patches. In the the Pg world, the most obvious way is to have 
> attribution in a public space.
>
> Perhaps an email that goes out to -announce (and planet) for each 
> release that is a thank you to contributors? That way we don't touch 
> the release notes at all.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Joshua D. Drake
>
>
>
Hey  Joshua, what does a 'Normal" person look like???  :-)

I did help review some code for a pg contributor once, but it was very 
minor.  If I was 17, I would probably get a kick out of seeing my name 
mentioned - but now I would be embarrassed, because what I did was was 
quite insignificant in the scale of things.

I think a separate list of contributors would be good.  How about some 
'Browne points' mechanism which would give a rough measure of the value 
of the contribution.  My contribution would probably rate '1', whereas 
Tom's would be at least '100,000,000' - more realistically: my 
contribution would not rate at all, but Tom's would still be the largest 
by far!  Perhaps a log scale so Tom would not show us up so much, and 
the contributions of new people would look more significant?  Probably 
any such scheme would be too difficult to administer in practice, or 
taken far too seriously, though it might be fun.


Cheers,
Gavin