Re: Recentish C-s M-y change

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2558 bytes --]

I've removed the name from the following quote, because the topic I'm
bringing up is not about that person, not even the context of "their"
message, but simply and solely the sentiment quoted.

On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 3:15 AM someone wrote:

>  it is not all that much to ask that changes to existing
> behaviour is done by discussion first, in a small group to feel what
> the reprecautions might be.
>

This might feel true, but both academics who study software engineering and
people who manage software projects for large, medium, and small teams will
all tell you that it's very rarely borne out by experiment. In practice,
the sort of "must check first" approach to multi-person software creation
leads to some combination of massive overhead, ossification, cover-your-ass
behavior, and deteriorating team dynamics. It works in small, tightly-knit
groups with a high degree of both on-topic and incidental interaction, and
basically doesn't work otherwise*. In a widely distributed volunteer group
like most multi-person free software communities, you either have a BDFL,
you trust your developers to use their judgement (including occasionally
being wrong and recovering), or your project atrophies.

In this case, Lars was exactly right:

> Here a developer
> made a change, we tried it out for a time, I said "this is a bit
> annoying", others agreed, and the change was reverted.  This is how the
> system should work.


That said, it's fine for people to say something semantically like "I think
we might be getting a little too loose with big changes on the bleeding
edge. Maybe we should use feature branches more often?". It's possible that
that's the exact sentiment that people are trying to express, but the
realities of email lists creates a wide gulf between the above expression
and "why are these things changed without doing some rudimentary query of
users?".

I hope this helps, and doesn't just add to the noise.
~Chad

* I've seen this reported by people including researchers at MIT; at large
companies like Amazon, Boeing, Google, IBM, and Microsoft; at medium-sized
companies like Oracle (back when their software teams were medium-sized),
Cygnus, and Red Hat, and at companies so small that nobody should recognize
their names. If you're interested in the topic, I suggest Fred Brooks'
_Mythical Man-Month_ as a baseline, and his _The Design of Design_ for a
follow-up, as well as _Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams_. (Caveat:
it's been a while since I studied this, so there are probably more recent
sources available.)

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3190 bytes --]