Re: knngist patch support

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 3:00 AM, Oleg Bartunov <oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su> wrote:
>> version I saw hadn't any documentation whatever.  It's not committable
>> on documentation grounds alone, even if everybody was satisfied about
>> the code.
>
> well, there is enough documentation to review patch.

Where is there any documentation at all? There are no changes to doc/
at all; no README; and not even a lengthy comment block anywhere that
I saw. Nor did the email in which the patch was submitted clearly lay
out the design of the feature.

> In my understanding
> this was always enough to submit code. User's documentation is depend on
> discussion and review and can be added later
> before releasing beta.

Several people have said this lately, but it doesn't match what I've
seen of our practice over the last year and a half; Tom regularly
boots patches that lack documentation (or necessary regression test
updates). Sure, people often submit small patches without
documentation thinking to fill it in later, but anything major pretty
much has to have it, AFAICS. From my own point of view, I would never
commit anything that lacked documentation, for fear of being asked to
write it myself if the patch author didn't. Of course it's a bit
different for committers, who can presumably be counted on to clean up
their own mess, but I still think it's fair to expect at least some
effort to be put into the docs before commit.

...Robert