Re: WIP: CoC V5

Another anecdotal thing.  Personal attacks sometimes soften the blow. Take that as you will.

 

For example if Tom makes some snide remark like "Do all Bostonians program this way?"

 

It would lessen the blow of the criticism of the code as I would think he's making fun of Bostonians coding style more than he is about my abilities, and I as a Bostonian just don't know any better.

He can also make fun of my tabbing style and say  "What's wrong with your editor? Perhaps you need to use a different one or change the settings"

 

Although maybe those don't constitute personal attacks.  I don't know.

 

 

Thanks,

Regina

 

From: Regina Obe [mailto:lr@pcorp.us]
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2016 9:08 AM
To: 'Chris Travers' <chris.travers@gmail.com>
Cc: 'Geoff Winkless' <pgsqladmin@geoff.dj>; 'Psql_General (E-mail)' <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Subject: RE: [GENERAL] WIP: CoC V5

 

> On 13 January 2016 at 03:10, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> The "disparaging remarks" part of this could easily be taken to forbid
>> technical criticism of any sort, eg "this patch is bad because X,Y,
>> and Z", even when X,Y, and Z are perfectly neutral technical points.
>> "Of any kind" doesn't improve that either.  I'm on board with the
>> "personal attacks" part.  Maybe "disparaging personal remarks" would be better?

> One thing to think about here is the idea of framing the process.  One reason it might be a good idea to have a "respect the commons" clause is that it becomes a good way to think about the interaction of review and technical discussion.  I.e. both sides want to improve

> the software.  The focus is on the software, not on the other person.

> People *can* take offense when you say their code is not good enough, particularly when it is true, because for better or worse we do often identify with what we produce.  But I would hope that if the focus is on improvement of the software the this becomes at least a

> bit less of a problem..

--

> Best Wishes,

> Chris Travers

 

Very good point.  I know personally I feel more hurt at my code being criticized than someone criticizing some random aspect of me.  That said

 

Perhaps something like

 

"we judge contributions primarily based on how easily it fits into our existing code base and the popularity of the problem or feature it targets"

 

I was going to talk about correctness and all that, but I think that's kind of inferred by the comment about fitting into our existing code base.  If it's not correct it wouldn't fit anyway.

 

Thanks,

Regina