Subject: Re: Nobody is THE one making contribution

From: Felipe Contreras <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 19:09:50 -0600

Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Felipe Contreras <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> >> You are not THE one making contribution.
> >
> > When I'm sending a patch, I have the role of "contributor".
> 
> Yes, you are a contributor, but there are other contributors to the
> change under discussion.

There are other people _contributing_, but typically they are not
assigned the role of _contributor_.

This has been my experience in all the open source projects I've worked
on.

My guess is that semantically the role of contributor is different
because they are the ones bearing the brunt of the work (thinking the
idea, coding, testing, cleaning, sending the patch, addressing comments,
re-coding, re-testing, re-cleaing, sending another patch... etc).

Of course everyone contributes, but in any given patch series, the
"contributor" contributes the most.

> > In your own release notes [1] you say:
> >
> >   New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.29.0 are as
> >   follows.
> >
> > Presumably these are the people who contributed patches, not reviews.
> 
> If I said "These community members have their name as an author of a
> patch for the first time since v2.29", would that mean those who do
> not have any commit under their name are not community members?

No. It would just mean they had other roles (not contributor).

For example, when a company pays their employees to contribute to the
project, the company can be considered a contributor (e.g. Google).

> > I don't know why you feel the need to explain that to me. I have been
> > contributing to open source projects for more than 20 years.
> 
> Because you are acting as if you don't know and have to always be
> the right one no matter what.  You may not mean to do so, but that
> is how your behaviour appears to me (note that I did not know say
> "to others").

Yes, but you do not read minds, and you can't know what is happening
inside mine.

Attempting to do so is usually not a good idea [1].

> I won't have time to respond to your word games after I send this
> message.

Words are the only tool we have to communicate among minds.

There's a reason why linguistics is an entire field of study; some
people are trying to really understand what other people are really
trying to say.

I for one don't understand why you would change the subject of the
thread to "Nobody is THE one making contribution", and then not be
interested in understanding what others understand by the word
"contribution".

But I'm not going to read into it something you didn't attempt to say.

I don't read minds.

Cheers.

[1] https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-blog/common-cognitive-distortions-mind-reading

-- 
Felipe Contreras