10 Aug 2009 lkcl   » (Master)

"Stress is where the mind compares the external world with the internal one, cannot cope, and places blame on the external world for the discrepancy"

a very sensible person told me this. they also gave a cute example:

I Hate Your Tie!

noo - what you mean to say is, "i have a feeling of hate, and.. and.. i'm going to... blame it on YOUR tie! yes, that's right - it's your tie's fault!"

i told this to a friend one day, when he said to me:

I HATE rush hour traffic

noooo, what you mean is, "i have a feeling of hate, and i'm going to BLAME it on the traffic".

he did laugh at that :)

well, recently, we have this:

luke leighton is causing problems with the webkit development process

nooo, what you mean is, "i can cope with the existing webkit development process, but i cannot cope with the direction and the implications that luke leighton is taking ME, therefore i am going to BLAME luke leighton."

the quotes last straw quotes was when i created an automated bugzilla patch-submission system, because the number of patches and associated bugreports, to get webkit its glib / gobject bindings, has gone up to _thirty_.

the webkit ChangeLog system is very strict, and very good. in the ChangeLog files, you place the filenames that have been modified by the rest of the patch. this means that an automated system can extract those filenames.

what i did was i wrote a patch parser:

http://lkcl.net/webkit/patman

which can understand svn diff files (and probably other diff -u files as well)

by combining the extraction of information from the ChangeLog entry and the "one big monster" diff, a series of smaller diffs can be created, with "proper" ChangeLog entries right at the top, to fit with webkit's submission process.

also in the ChangeLog it's good practice to place the bugreport number, and - again - i decided to make good use of this.

as there are thirty separate patches, i decided to write some further code which can submit attachments to bugzilla, automatically.

the patch exists, the bugreport number's in the ChangeLog, the patch is in an acceptable format - all good so far.

except... wait - the bugreport doesn't exist yet, so it has to be created.

so, that's what i did - create some bugreports. then, taking those bugreport numbers, i placed them into the ChangeLog entries, ready to run the automated uploader.

then, i made some final checks on the uploader.

when i checked the bugreports, to make sure that i would be submitting the right ones, and not go and submit patches that had already been submitted, i found that several of them had been closed.

they'd only been open for about half an hour, twenty minutes - wtf??

there was a particularly petty message in each of them:

"please do not submit empty bugreports".

mark - i'd gone to a lot of trouble to put the dependencies in, and to put a short message indicating the purpose of the bugreport, pending submission of the attachments.

i'm sorry if you feel that that's defined as "empty".

so, rather annoyed, i reopened one, because i wasn't sure how the auto-submitter would react to adding in an attachment to a closed bug.

the tool worked - the attachment was submitted. hooray!

next bug. reopen. submit. aannd.. i got presented with a message:

"Thanks for trying to contribute, but the manner and attitude in which you're doing so does not fit with the approach that the WebKit project takes to development. If you believe your account should be restored, please send email to admin@webkit.org explaining why."

nooo, you mean, "there is a discrepancy between what i can cope with, and what you are trying to achieve, and i am going to blame YOU for that".

so.

anyone reading this, if you would like webkit to become equal to its peers with respect to python, i need your help in dealing with the discrepancy between what webkit is and what it can become.

you can write to: admin@webkit.org expressing your views.

the code's already working: webkit has glib/gobject bindings, and from there it has auto-generated python bindings - it just needs to go into the main webkit repository, by following the webkit review process.

if that process is creaking at the seams and causing "stress" to the developers following it, and you can think of a way that the developers can cope without "blaming luke leighton", please do make it known.

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