5 minutes? Really?

Daniel says this issue

https://github.com/stan-dev/stan/issues/795#issuecomment-263905571

is an easy 5-minute fix.

In my ongoing role as wet blanket, let’s be realistic. It’s
sort of like saying it’s an hour from here to Detroit because
that’s how long the plane’s in the air.

Nothing is a 5 minute fix (door to door) for Stan and I really
don’t want to give people the impression that it should be. It
then just makes them feel bad when it takes longer than 5 minutes,
because they feel like they’ve wasted the time this will really take.
Or it makes people angry who suggest other “5 minute fixes” that
we don’t get around to doing because they’re really more involved.

This can’t be five minutes (certainly not net to the project)
when you need to create a branch, fix the issue, run the tests,
run cpplint, commit, push, create a pull request,
nag someone else to review it (then they have to then fill out the
code-review form), then you might have to make fixes (and perhaps
get another sign off from the reviewer), then Jenkins and Travis
may need to be kicked, (then someone has to decide to merge),
then we get to do it again in the upstream with changes to
the interfaces.

Easy once you’re used to the process, but not 5 minutes!

Or if it really is just five minutes, just do it. It’ll save
me writing a 10 minute rant about how it’s not 5 minutes. :-)

  • Bob

Alright… I’ve been called out. I’ll time myself.

1 Like

Do we also get to time the fall guy who code-reviews the resulting sed-job (?) :)

And now I see why my time estimate was way off – I bet Bob saw the issues that I didn’t see.

This gets way into the code generator, which I hadn’t realized when I made that comment.

It took me < 1 minute to get set up. It took me < 4 additional minutes to make code changes. It’s taken me 5 additional minutes to realize that the issue is much, much bigger than I thought.

I take my words back.