Code Review in Cabal Project

[Theophile Hécate Choutri]

Hi Artem, and thank you for the email.

Yes, thank you very much Francesco, the feedback you left certainly avoided
a lot of pain, and you contributed to maintain this patch up to standards.

Regarding the "why" and the "how not to reproduce this", interactions that
leave a sour taste in the mouth are pretty much inevitable in the messy
business of human interactions. Shit happens, the best we can do is reflect
on it and do what is in our power to improve what we can.
But it is true that remote communication, by text, leaves much in terms of
nuance and interactivity.

Again, thank you Francesco.

On Thu, 4 May 2023 at 20:40, Artem Pelenitsyn <a.pelenitsyn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> cabal-devel mailing list
> cabal-devel at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cabal-devel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/attachments/20230504/c01664f2/attachment.html>