Re: finally: new authors

On Sunday, May 4, 2003, at 05:14 AM, Gabor Hojtsy wrote:

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, that makes automation tough....

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.

Well, *I* would. In a world of 6 billion, being among 400 can have some value.

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.

Now *I* am thinking of a human credited system to moderate or augment a machine system. "Points" via CVS, via humans, etc....

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.

What is the preferred language? Most of this is doable in perl, or C, or even PHP.

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)

You have *also* pointed out other issues I have *not* deeply considered. (Value beyond characters, lines, number of commits, or social value).

are eliminated. So we can only talk about using such a system, if someone volunteers to do the neccessery programming.

To handle this on an ongoing basis, a CVSROOT/loginfo(.pl) module could spread the work per-commit. Compare the changed *characters* between two versions, log it somewhere.

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?

As authors? No. I think they should be honored too, but not as manual changers, unless they changed the manual..... since bugs are already db-driven, the top bug workers should be easy to quantify.

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?

We could db that, but that idea only adds to the workload. Hmm... A person, thinking alone, in a room, and being brilliant with only *one* line or character is very hard to measure. We cannot measure it well by code, by lines, by characters, or even by their popularity among others.... no system has been proposed for such a case, be they doc, bugs, dev, notes, etc..... :-(

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)?

To compare lines and changed characters? Yes, I have written much of this code already. To compare the *value* of the changes? No. :-)

As I have said I think numbers should only be used to help in the decision and not to be based the decision on.

Your new examples (though trimmed) are good, and have altered my perspective. How would you (and others) feel about the following: 1. Authors voting *must* read all commits. 2. Of the 20(?) fixed authors, at least half (10) must be changed per year (to ensure new credit, stimulate keeping a position of credit, and avoid author overload). If there are ten listed, 5 must be changed. 3. Depending on the systems available, the voters *should* look at changed lines/chars, XML changes, section changes, etc. They should (by charter) look at as many pieces of information as they have available to them. It is up to the candidates to provide any enhanced information beyond the current systems. 4. Voting should be sealed and private, to eliminate peer pressure, until votes are final. 5. Discussion of their expected votes, and actual votes should be public. 6. A majority of the voters should be allowed to disqualify any other person from voting. 7. Put us lesser authors on another page, so we can get our 6px credit. :-) 8. Non-voters should not be put on the updated authors list, without explaining extreme difficulty (to prune inactive authors).

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

Cheap stuff, my business is doing good. Is there a good money-transfer system to there? Ronald Chmara Ronin Professional Consulting LLC 520-326-6109 "It can only be attributable to human error." --Hal.