Hi Samuel, > I've recently had a *VERY* bad experience with submitting a patch to > the Firefox folks. I won't go into details here, but suffice it to > say that there was an exorbitant amount of politicking involved, and > frankly, I feel like total crap for even bothering to try and fix a > bug that is, oh, I dunno, five years old and counting.
Darcs is relatively free from politics, being a much smaller project that Firefox; however, we do suffer from a lack of time. To get an idea, David is teaching at Oregon State University and presumably preparing for his wedding; Juliusz has recently become a lecturer in the French university system; and I (no great contributor, but current unstable branch maintainer) am writing up my dissertation. I don't mean to make excuses for the project, just to highlight the fact that darcs is running on hobby time, and very limited at that. Hopefully, things will improve in summer. In the meantime, we are always very eager for people to contribute to darcs! > I obviously expect politics here -- all significant projects need some > kind of organization for tracking changes to the code. What is the > political process used here? Process ------- Darcs has two branches, a stable and a unstable one. Using darcs send you typically submit patches to the unstable branch via the darcs-devel list. Periodically, your unstable branch maintainer will review the patches and decide if they go in or not. Ideally, everybody in the community chips in with comments and review, but ultimately, the responsability falls the patch maintainer. My intention is to provide patch review service every week (Saturday morning, CET, self-discipline permitting) On less frequent occasions, the stable branch maintainer will decide that darcs is ready for release. He (currently Tommy) will selectively pull in patches from the unstable branch and produce a number of release candidates until we have something that's ready to ship. Eric the branch maintainer -------------------------- So much for process, now since I am your first line of resistance, you probably want to know what my personal attitudes to patch-review, are. Again, nothing hard and fast here, just some basic attitudes. I tend to err on /over/accepting patches, one because I trust the community to shout if something is really wrong, and two because this is the unstable branch after all, and we can always roll things back if I made a mistake. If I find something I do not understand or do not agree with, I tend to ask for discussion or resubmission rather than outright reject patches. The rare rejections usually occur when a patch provides a functionality that we (as a community) decide darcs is better off without. I try my best to scrutinise the patches that come in. Sadly, I am still rather lacking in the experience, wisdom and knowledge required for this kind of work, and may not always be up to the task. Hopefully, I have so far been honest enough to to ask any silly questions I may have when I do have them and that I shall continue to do so. Some more consequences of my inexperience: - I tend to not have strong opinions, so you might see me flip flopping a lot or relying on the mailing list. - I tend to nitpick on details (whitespace, style, patch comments) whilst missing the more important issues (race conditions, general correctness). Worse, I suspect that I am not entirely consistent in my nitpickiness; apologies to all affected. Hopefully, it is more forgiving on newbies and more demanding on Davids. > My question, therefore, is related to, "How *painful* will it > be for me to contribute back to darcs?" I expect it to be relatively smooth sailing. Do check the activity of the darcs-devel list to get an idea. You might also want to see when patches get Rejected, or when I ask for resubmission. I hope this gives you a better idea what to expect. Don't hesitate if you have any more questions, -- Eric Kow http://www.loria.fr/~kow PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9 Merci de corriger mon français.
pgpXhjEkdotXZ.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ darcs-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-devel
