The risk here is that everytime a newcomer tries out our codebase and finds it broken, we lose a potential recruit. And we don't have so much incoming attention that we can afford to be lax with it. Our situation is akin to a store that is mostly empty: we can't afford to just shut down longer, because that way lies death. We have to stay open for business.
Not allowing in obvious breakage is also a way to show respect for your collaborators, other people programming on the same codebase. When you come to Arc you would be demotivated if the news app didn't work, if you had to first get it working, figure out who broke it and how. It's the same with others. When we find a few hours to hack on something fun, we all prefer that it start out in a non-broken state. And we try to leave it in a non-broken state.
So I have a suggestion for you: everytime you create a PR, first try to break it yourself. Ask yourself what changed, and what it may affect. Try to catch the really obvious stuff yourself, like "does news load, does it look the same, can I submit a post?" Run the unit tests. Report in the commit message or PR what all you did by way of testing. These exercises will make you a better programmer. Tell yourself that the goal is to make changes in an efficient manner, solve the problem in a single PR, rather than require more changes to fix breakage in one change, that cause their own breakage, and on and on.
None of this is particularly serious. It's not like any breakage here is a deal-breaker. As long as others see you making an effort to get better I think you'll get a lot of support.
Certainly a lot of things could be tested more; this would help.
But also, we might want to set Github to require the tests to pass on a PR before letting it be merged. I could be wrong, but I think a PR can be merged even if the tests fail.
This is a slight step away from "anyone can commit anything", I acknowledge. But it's also a step towards stability. At least the person would have to fix or delete the failing tests before merging.
Ok. I will try to be more careful in the future. In fact, I won't even merge until someone looks at the commit, fair enough?
It isn't broken, though, at least not if "broken" implies an unusable state. I did test the forum before I pushed, I just didn't catch everything... I didn't even know prompt.arc existed, or what it was for, but apparently neither did you. ;)
But news does still work. It just doesn't work from the same location as previously, which I think is hardly setting fire to the store.
For what it's worth I agree with the app/news changes. So Good Job I say.
And with that said, after looking at the anarki directory it's apparently becoming a dumping ground for people to place files at the top level. I'm not sure why this is happening, but I hope others take a look at what you have done with app/news and continue the trend of organizing things better.
