[erlang-questions] Erlang 10 years of Open Source; it is time for the next step

Matthias Lang matthias@REDACTED
Fri Mar 21 15:03:19 CET 2008


Masklinn writes:

 > I completely agree with this: the core Erlang/OTP team should *not*  
 > have to rewrite "99%" of the patches (Kenneth's number). They should  
 > not, in fact, have to rewrite any patch (unless the rewrite or  
 > corrections are trivial, or the patch submitter doesn't have the  
 > necessary resources e.g. to test the patch on all erlang-supported  
 > archs): 

Take a look at a patch that someone actually submitted, for example:

  http://www.erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-January/032345.html

it's a pretty typical user-contributed patch, i.e. it's a small
change, only about five lines of code, it fixes a definite problem,
and, most importantly, it's mostly crap. The guy who submitted the
patch

     1. couldn't be bothered testing it properly

and  2. messed with some internals which he most likely doesn't 
        understand.

and  3. made some arbitrary and undocumented design decisions, e.g.
        about how wide the hash should be

and  4. couldn't be bothered coming up with a solution which works
        with HIPE and with old versions

i.e. he did the first 5% of the job and then wasn't prepared to put in
the hard work to actually finish. Feedback from the OTP group (your
suggestion) isn't going to fix that.

Matt 

(the patch is mine, i.e. I am too lazy to do the job properly. Sorry.)



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