[Development] (no subject)

Craig.Scott at csiro.au Craig.Scott at csiro.au
Wed Dec 21 07:52:54 CET 2011


On 21/12/2011, at 5:14 PM, Robin Burchell wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:57 AM,  <Craig.Scott at csiro.au> wrote:
>> 
>> On 21/12/2011, at 12:19 PM, <mark.keir at nokia.com> <mark.keir at nokia.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Posting patches to the JIRA bugreporting system is contrary to the terms of use for that system.
>>> https://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/secure/TermsAndConditions.html
>>> Don't do this.
>> 
>> I know I'll probably be shot down immediately, but.....
>> 
>> This is one of the more annoying things about the changes that have been going on with Qt.
> 
> This isn't new. Ever since I've been wanting to submit patches, pretty
> much, JIRA - at least officially - hasn't been an option for legal
> reasons, because it bypasses the CLA. The CLA is the primary reason
> why patches can't be accepted from other sources, as far as I
> understand it.

I've hit that wall too with patches I submitted. Even if you've accepted the CLA though, your patches still are not accepted via JIRA, which is annoying since it's really just a book keeping problem at that point. All the legal stuff is settled (you've accepted the CLA) but how does JIRA know that when you try to upload a patch? How does an issue assignee know that the patch you've provided is legally safe for them to incorporate into Qt? It would be great if someone knew of a way to mark users as having accepted the CLA or not and only allowing them to upload patches if they had accepted it. Maybe even go so far as having to accept the CLA for uploading any attachment to a bug, but that might be annoying for people who just want to report a bug with a screenshot but not also contribute a fix (and I'd expect there would be a non-trivial number of people wanting to do that). Any JIRA ninjas on the list who have ideas for how this could be done?


> 
> [ that having been said, I agree that it's really annoying, but I
> can't really see a nice method to solve this, other than possibly
> directing them to accept the CLA on gerrit the first time they upload
> a patch to JIRA, but that's going to require customisations.. and in
> the end, it's probably better to focus on streamlining the
> contribution & review process we have first ]


I'd actually suggest the reverse. I would hope that it would be a relatively non-disruptive change to make JIRA aware of who has accepted the CLA and who hasn't. It should be possible to do this without any developers having to know about it. If that is done, then there are no more steps required to allow anyone who wants to submit a patch to do so. In contrast, getting the contribution process in place for gerrit looks like more work and targets a smaller number of users (everyone could submit a patch, but only those willing to learn the process would submit via gerrit).

Don't get me wrong, the contribution and review process is a great idea. What I'd really like to see though is the ability for the average developer to submit a patch to JIRA and for the maintainer to be able to then merge in the patch if they are happy with it. The alternative is that the patch is not submitted at all and the maintainer has to come up with the patch themselves. If you are worried that the maintainer would get overloaded with patches, well they can always ignore them until they are ready to deal with them - this is no different to the patches not having been submitted in the first place, which is what the current situation will result in anyway.

--
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia






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