Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#81

Post by javier_e06 » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

Torvalds in one famous Google presentation he talked about the "circle of trust" in relation of how we all should handle sharing code as in: "Is my repo and I accept code from a selective group of trusted individuals"

In the corporate world is more like Seinfield's Soup Nazi skit.

We are all working towards AI accepting or rejecting code changes. Humans have egos and their idiosyncratic bias/baggage get in the way of adopting or rejecting code changes in an objective manner. Githook 50/72 rule anyone?

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#82

Post by dyingkneepad » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:19 PM UTC

guntherhermann wrote: post #19

coldtea wrote: post #2

> "Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control sy…

"Trust but verify" is a nonsense statement. If you trust, you do not need to verify, and vice versa.

Everybody introduces bugs, and for a lot of classes of bugs the best way to prevent them is manual code reviews. Not everything can be easily caught by CI and tools.

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#83

Post by brazzy » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:24 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #51

winrid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the startup successful? :)

Actually no, and IMHO a significant contribution to that failure was that they had bred a culture of cheating where developers would bypass these controls. For example, one of the managers would get his brother to approve his changes, and vice-versa, even if the code was total gibberish. Generally, the lesson I took away from that place is that you can blow $10 million in seed money and end up with worthless code if…

Sounds to me that the real takeaway is that the essentials you list don't, in fact, matter if you have incompetent developers.

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#84

Post by javier_e06 » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:25 PM UTC

someweirdperson wrote: post #17

Calling pull requests "pull request " when it is a job to create a change is what's wrong. The author isn't actually requesting anything. But what else could be a nice short term for "collection of changes with technically enforced reviews and tests"?

I couldn't agree more. When the PR is approved then the button to complete the PR in Github is (drum-roll please) MERGE. And who is doing the merge? Me. Gitlab calls it merge request.

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#85

Post by RugnirViking » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #83

jiggawatts wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no, and IMHO a significant contribution to that failure was that they had bred a culture of cheating where developers would bypass these controls. For example, one of the managers would get his brother to approve his changes, and vice-versa, even if the code was total gibberish. Generally, the lesson I took away from that place is that you can blow $10 million in seed money and end up with worthless code if…

Sounds to me that the real takeaway is that the essentials you list don't, in fact, matter if you have incompetent developers.

well certainly if you have incompetent developers in senior management, but is that a surprise to anyone? I don't think a good git workflow or whatever could ever fix something like that

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#86

Post by dkersten » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #2

> "Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control sy…

Yeah. I trust my team mates, but we use PR’s and approvals as a means of doing code review to make sure things don’t slip through and that everything has had multiple eyes. It’s not about trust, but improving quality, because we’re humans and humans miss things or make mistakes. It also provides a nice record of why changes were added, a place to link tickets/documentation, automaton hooks etc.

I love PR’s as a concept and tool. I also often use PR’s to merge changes on my personal projects even when I’m the only developer.

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#87

Post by dkersten » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

lowercased wrote: post #75

dahart wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PR is about verifying This is interesting as a counterpoint to trusting, but it’s funny, I’ve never thought about PRs in either of those terms, not within a team or company anyway. The Pull Request can also be about the code writer asking for review, asking the question ‘is this generally the right way to go?’ The funny thing about projecting ‘trust’ and ‘verification’ onto the process is that PRs simply do not pre…

I've had groups where I eventually 'approved' a PR, because... deadlines... even when it wasn't meeting defined standards (primarily around tests/docs). Comments like "please add a test" or "please document X" were just ignored (both inside the version control system and in slack). Eventually, I would merge, and occasionally, we'd hit some bug, trace it back to that, and I would catch blame for "passing" it. Not the…

That sounds like a team problem. In my team, contents get addressed and team members don’t approve PR’s they don’t feel meet standards even if there are deadlines.

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#88

Post by 62951413 » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #11

coldtea wrote: post #2

> "Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control sy…

> This guy ... has never heard of "trust but verify" I think he has, and actually knows where it comes from and what it means. "Trust but verify" is a Russian proverb that was used to describe the hoped-for and treaty-mediated relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Reagan-Gorbachev era. So arch-enemies of a Cold War that are pointing world-ending nuclear arsenals at each other and slow…

Isn't "Don't expect what you don't inspect" an American proverb?

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#89

Post by zajio1am » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

The original purpose of PR was to accept patches from outsiders (people without write access to the project repository), as an alternative to sending patches to the project mailing list. In open-source development if there is a core team with write access to the project repository, i would be surprised if all patches from members of the core team were merged through PR process.

Re: Are pull requests bad because they originate from open-source development?

#90

Post by lisasays » Tue, Apr 25, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #11

coldtea wrote: post #2

> "Pull requests were invented to gatekeep access to open-source projects. In open source, it's very common that not everyone is given free access to changing the code, so contributors will issue a pull request so that a trusted person can then approve the change. "I think this is really bad way to organise a development team. "If you can't trust your team mates to make changes carefully, then your version control sy…

> This guy ... has never heard of "trust but verify" I think he has, and actually knows where it comes from and what it means. "Trust but verify" is a Russian proverb that was used to describe the hoped-for and treaty-mediated relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Reagan-Gorbachev era. So arch-enemies of a Cold War that are pointing world-ending nuclear arsenals at each other and slow…

No, it's not an echo of the Cold War. It's just another form of peer review and change management. Which some people are actually in favor of.

But if one is ideologically committed to seeing peer rerview as adversarial ... then that's the kind of viewpoint what one is committed to, I guess.