Tanktalus I feel that I owe you an explanation. As you know your vote patch has been applied for some time in a test configuration. As I am one of the people who experiences its effect I should say why I havent promoted it to a full patch: I am not sure if the patch is healthy for the site. For mature users seeing the downvotes is nice. But i find myself grumbling about certain things I see which makes me think that others will go far beyond grumbling. Its for this reason that I have been reluctant to promote the patch.

Also you need to understand that this glacial pace (which I know to be frustrating) also effects stuff the gods themselves have written. I have written things that will never see the light of day here, I have written things that are in production but remain totally undocumented and thus for all intents and purposes non-existant. There are various reasons for this but who posted the patch is NOT one of them, being a god here only slightly raises your chance that a non-trivial patch will be accepted by the community as appropriate and needed.

Basically I see it like this, you can break patches down into three classes:

  1. Controversial -- Patches that touch on controversial subjects like voting and experience. These will always be difficult patches to get into production just because of their potential to stir up trouble.
  2. Infrastructure -- Anything that is heavily used or involves multiple patches and table updates is going to take a while to get into production. Its difficult and time consuming to apply and test patches like this, and to do things like this properly takes considerable care and understanding of the sites behaviour and design to do right. Infrastructure changes also require heavy testing, and for one reason or another we still have problems in this area.
  3. Minor Feature or Enhancement -- These usually go in almost instantly. Assuming it doesnt fall into one of the other categories generally all this takes is to make a patch and ask somebody to apply it. Its quite possible that the code will be totally rewritten prior to being applied however the presence of an initial patch almost always results in something equivelent being applied. Cabal Matrix is an example of this. Arunbear had the idea, and put together an initial implementation, ysth rewrote part of it, and i added some more changes as well. But it got applied quite quickly.

Lastly there is one thing that a patch producer needs to do: champion the patch and idea the patch represents. The gods are human, with various interests and responsibilities meaning we are just as forgetful as the next guy. If we havent applied your patch it may not be because of any particular reason it may simply be because we have forgetten that there is a patch that needs to be applied. Reminding us through /msg's or through PMD's about the proposed change can really help. With controversial nodes, PMD's discussing the state of the patch and the issues it raises can help the community come to a collective decision about the proposal.

Anyway, the fact is that most patches that I see remain unapplied are in the first two categories. For some reason many peoples first patch tends to fall into one of the two (most often the reason being they are "controversial" patches). Also a potential patcher needs to understand that rejecting patches is part of our job as gods. However i personally beleive that the person posting the patch is owed an explanation as to why, and if one isnt forthcoming I beleieve the poster should just ask.

---
$world=~s/war/peace/g

In reply to Re^2: Open sourcing perlmonks by demerphq
in thread Open sourcing perlmonks by BUU

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