Code Review in Cabal Project

[Artem Pelenitsyn]

Dear Cabal team,

I have a couple points on the multiple components PR
(https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/8726) drama. I didn't want to spend
everyone's time during the meeting, and you can decide if you want to hear
more
about it now.

The whole discussion on the meeting (with one exception) sounded to me like
we're
scolding Francesco (@fgaz). I feel bad because of that. Hence my email. By
the
way, one exception imo is Mikolaj saying that the whole story is his
responsibility too. Thank you Mikolaj! I should say that me commenting on
red CI
probably added to the heat that was already there, and therefore it's also
my
responsibility. I'm sorry that the contributor got frustrated.

That said, I want to say a big THANK YOU to Francesco. You left high-quality
feedback, that myself (and I think others) can learn from. I personally
lack the
kind of expertise that you applied when doing this review. Please, do this
more
often! (time permitting, of course)

People keep asking (1) why this happened (contributor throwing hands in the
air
and seemingly abandoning PR) and how to avoid this in the future (2).

I don't feel qualified to answer (1), and I think no one should try to play
contributor's therapist (unless, of course, you have the education and
licence
for that). I don't believe any professional boundaries were crossed or
something
unreasonable happened. Not from Cabal team's (including Francesco) side, at
least. All the requests were fair and polite requests advocating for
improving
quality of Cabal's code base -- the very code base we interact a lot with,
and
quality of which we should try to improve.

My answer to (2) -- you won't be able to avoid it in the future. Unless, of
course, you are willing to abolish the code review process altogether. It
really
depends on a contributor and whether they are able to sustain the scrutiny
of
the process. And you can't control that. The response shouldn't be to lower
the
bar for the process imo.

It is my opinion that the biggest improvement to the future of Cabal would
be to
get more high-quality feedback for contributions, not less. Thank you,
Francesco, again!

--
Kind Regards, Artem
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