Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Improvments for NVMeOF dissector

From: Dario Lombardo <lomato@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 18:17:23 +0200
Hi Constantine
I know that sometimes working on a change without getting it merged soon can be frustrating. Unfortunately it is as you just described: this is a voluntary-based project where people donate their own time just for the love of the project itself. And it is not "don't bother me, I just don't have time", but instead "I am sorry I would like to have more time to spend on it, but, you know, my employer asks me to work... :)". Straight to the point: sometimes it took me MONTHS to have a single commit merged, despite I am a core developer. Don't think that write access gives you a highway to the codebase. With great powers come great responsibilities: in the core team we also ask for other's consensus. That means that also with write access, we need to discuss with others which changes are required on a MR. And that could imply that weeks and sometimes months are required for the review if the change is complex or the interest is low. Your only option here is gently push and maybe someone will jump on it and move it forward. Consider that the Wireshark community is pretty active and is rare that you don't get feedback (maybe general, as in this case). Other open source projects simply ignore any contribution. Then, please, hold on: every contribution is valuable, but it may require time to be reviewed.

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 5:38 PM Constantine Gavrilov <CONSTG@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have waited for another week and nothing happens.

This merge request (!2405) was created more than two weeks ago, and the people who have looked into it either lost interest or do not have time.

I appreciate that everyone is so busy, but the same claim goes for contributors as well as developers.

I am more busy than most people, and I have found time to contribute. I equally expect that someone finds time to look into this work. This is a reasonable expectation as long as the projects states that contributions are welcome. If every developer is so busy and there is no formal process to assign the contribution for review, or a measure of how many contributions were evaluated by people holding core developer status, while there is also a taste of coldness in communication -- "do not bother us, we are busy and  owe you  nothing", why shall I bother?

I feel I have wasted my time. I have already explained that I have nothing  to gain from this. It was an act of gratitude to the project. But I do not want to feel that I have to push it down the project throat. As I have said there are many changes to improve NVMEoF dissector, and if there is no interest nor cooperation, I can easily continue in my local tree and it will serve my work just fine. This also means that these changes will never see public access.


The same goes for MR 2522 and 2324. Regarding the last one, I simply fail to grasp what is the problem there. Typically, build problems are solved within minutes (like a recent problem building on MAC). Since the change is so trivial, and beta builds of Fedora with gcc-11 are out, while the release is imminent, I do not understand why it has not been merged. Perhaps the problem is that I have provided the patch and should have just opened the bug report like people did reporting the MAC build issue?

So, I want to know what to do. Shall I close the merge requests and leave busy people alone with their busy affairs or perhaps we can work in the spirit of cooperation?

Until this point, I have contributed above 3k lines of code, where 800 lines are in the tree, and 2.2K lines are stuck in the review.  If this is not a significant contribution, I do not know what is. I understand responsibility and would not whine about lack of time (despite being very busy) if I had core developer access. Your call, core developers. Can we collaborate, or you are so busy that collaboration is not possible?



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Constantine Gavrilov
Storage Architect
Master Inventor
Tel-Aviv Storage Lab IDT Lead
Tel-Aviv IBM Storage Lab
1 Azrieli Center, Tel-Aviv
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From:        Constantine Gavrilov/Israel/IBM
To:        Developer support list for Wireshark <wireshark-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:        03/21/2021 05:37 PM
Subject:        Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Wireshark-dev] Improvments for NVMeOF dissector



Pascal, thank you.

> You should accommodate the project, and not the other way around.

I have never assumed otherwise, just tried to reach out...

I will wait until the end of the week and see what happens...


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Constantine Gavrilov
Storage Architect
Master Inventor
Tel-Aviv Storage Lab IDT Lead
Tel-Aviv IBM Storage Lab
1 Azrieli Center, Tel-Aviv
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