I don't think that future editing devalues someones work. But I think it can be undestood that we would like to give more credit to those who actually actively work on something.
But how do we determine this? Past contribution vs. future?
On a case-by-case basis, I guess.
Well, as you see, we are going to add 'many' people to the credits list either we go on the human route or the computer automated one.
What ensures that the first list will not be the last (for a long time) one?
What ensures that the list will change from the current one to anything else? Nothing :) We need to convince the current authors that the new system we come up with is ok, as was done with the license change. There is no guarantee that I will reply to any mails or do any work here starting from today. And there is no guarantee the list will change. If you don't trust people, then don't take anything for granted.
Well, to be fair most of the time, notes editors are simply copying over the user note with slight editing.
Bad form, this exposes the docs to copyright lawsuits. :-(
Adding notes, in that case, should notify the adder that they are releasing *all* intellectual property, copyright, etc etc. Or, we should add each notes user to the list of manual authors.
I prefer the first solution, notification that we will use the content without mentioning the contributor anywhere. This is what we have done so far.
The lights are turned on as that list starts, and people go out. Those lists are also cut in TV broadcasting and replaced with commercials. So do having a list of 400 contributors will be a real show of respect? I don't think so.
Will a list of 400 be treated with respect on the front page? The credits page? This is the issue.
I don't think that a list of 400 will be respected at any place. I would not spare my free time to be credited with being on a list with 6px chars displayed 5 minutes after the movie ended.
I feel much better when receiving a mail from any of my friends, though technically it is the same thing. But one mail reflects the feelings and care of someone, the other reflects some program's automated behaviour.
How would you feel about an automated system that added points for your peers appreciating you?
This is just how you approach the problem. Some computer systems allow us to express our views, but they are human views, and not determined by some system. The points my peer gives me are points from people and not from a computer system. Here the system works for the members, and not the members for the system.
All long whitespace is ignorable. As are character returns. I do not think they should be counted, and CVS counting them is annoying to me, but easily fixable. :-)
[...]
If a filter bypasses those, and concatenates each file, lines changes
don't matter.
[...]
That's obvious gaming and mistakes, and can be filtered out of "valued
commits", and any half-sane filter would strip out cr/lf combinations
before character comparison. The US comment is that "this isn't rocket
science", meaning that we don't need 20 years of study, simple filters
will do the job. Strip excess whitespace, and line characters, and the
job becomes simple.
OK, OK. So we came to some point where actual contributions are welcome. We had discussions earlier on how to detect when a translated file is committed to the English tree, instead of English content. We came to the decision that it is 'easily fixable' but nothing happened. I can assure you we have several ideas to speed up the builds, detect abandoned translations, etc. which can probably 'easily programed', but they are not done.
The question is if someone would like to volunteer to eliminate most of the weeknesses of the current CVS system, even while it is still not sure that a raw number based system will be used. It seems that you agree that a raw number based system can only be used if those weeknessed I mentioned (and probably others) are eliminated. So we can only talk about using such a system, if someone volunteers to do the neccessery programming.
I am neither that far into CVS, nor I would like to take my time with this, so don't count me on implementing anything in this field.
So we are talking about two opportunities: a real human based system where credit is based on open human decisions, which anybody can intervene in, and one imagined computer based system, which is not ready right now, which would somehow fairly decide who done more.
And what if we have a system counting real changes. How do you compare those changes to work done by closing bug reports, or with work done on user notes. How does that fit into the system. Will the guys reading notes deleting / editing them be honored in such a system?
And if you can add some measure for bug closing / commenting and notes handling, how would somebody know what time it took to make a change, how many effort is in that?
Consider the changes made by Thomas lately on the XSL sheets. They are not too big ones, if viewed from the automatic line change metric, but there is a very huge amount of research behind them. What if someone with not too much PHP source reading experience starts adding function documentation? The effort he puts into diging up the PHP source will probably be much bigger, then the work of someone rewriting paragraphs because of grammar mistakes, or unclean explanations. Or compare the work to someone's who relocates paragraphs into some common place (which no automatic system will detect IMHO).
I don't think that '2 lines changed' == '2 lines changed' can be treated a good metric. There can be very different types and amount of work done behind changing two lines.
What if some page is linked in the manual, which is not there anymore, or some protocol is mentioned bogusly. Someone who corrects this, needs to dig into the subject, find some page to provide similar information, find the right protocol which should be mentioned, etc. While this will only be a link change (20 chars?), the work done is much more then what someone does to fix a build error (eg. add <para> and </para> into note).
Well, that's *bad* automation. This is not 1986, we can now all afford computers which can compare thousands of lines in a short period of time.
OK. Can you afford to contribute time to code such a system (set of filters and stuff)?
I would feel much better about endorsing the human system if it could be over-ridden by numbers. If the numbers are wrong, fix the numeric system, as recoding computers seems much faster than re-coding humans. :-)
As I have said I think numbers should only be used to help in the decision and not to be based the decision on.
I think I can't be convinced with a beer. I don't like beer anyway ;) [By the way, I would like to buy a laptop, in case anyone is interested ;)]
ROTFL.... what make/model? :-)
Nothing expensive. I need a stable and modern one, but I have no big budget for this. There are some 900-1000$+VAT modoles in Hungary, which seem to be ok. The very low cost models here are Gericom (from Austria) and Portocom (Hungarian brand, assembled with parts from Taiwan :).
Goba