[syslog-ng] [list admin] discussion of patches

[Gergely Nagy]

Balazs Scheidler <bazsi at balabit.hu> writes:

> The big question is whether these discussions should be moved to a
> separate list, or rather it should stay here.

Personally, I'd prefer to keep them together, for a few reasons,
including, but not limited to:

* While developing a feature, feedback from people who will use it is
  most valuable.

  I experienced this first hand during both the value-pairs()
  discussion, where we got a lot of very useful feedback from thist
  list, and I saw it happening earlier when I first posted the mongodb
  destination driver.

  Also, I got useful feedback too, when I posted my plans to rework the
  SQL destination driver.

* There were cases where an error or problem was reported, and the
  result was a patch. Currently, that needs to be sent to one list
  only. But if user and development lists are separate, then the patch
  will end up on both.

  Which is not a problem per-se, but if someone's only subscribed to the
  devel list, there might be a bit of missing context.

  Not to mention that if someone has similar issues, and the patch is
  only posted to the devel list, that's tough luck.

* The volume of patches isn't that high to warrant a separate list, in
  my opinion. If it ever increases to amounts that disrupt normal
  communication, then a separate list can still be created.

But the strongest reason against a development list is - in my opinion -
is that feedback from the community, even from those who are not
interested in the code itself, only the functionality, is very valuable.

I know I would feel a very strong urge to cross-post design ideas,
because as a developer, I tend to see things a bit differently, and
my experience so far has been that community feedback made my patches
better. If it weren't for this list, value-pairs() wouldn't exist, and
the mongodb driver would be very dumb and useless still, like it was
when I first posted it. The $(substr) template function was also
developed on this list, only partly by myself, based on a user request,
and then enhanced by the requester. I don't think things like that would
be so easy and straigthforward to do with a split list.

I don't want to lose these things, the ability to ask the greater
community for feedback - because in the end, they are the intended
audience. But with separate lists, there's a risk I would, or that half
my stuff would end up on this list anyway.

In any case, I do not think that the volume of patches would be
disruptive at the moment. There might come spikes, when the syslog-ng
team at Balabit prepare their patches and send them to the list,
but... that's not an incredible amount, either.

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