On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 11:36 -0600, Matt T. Proud wrote: > I do not want to belabor this issue and make any more of you angry, but > I do think that what you have posed here is still less-than-ideal, for I > have, on countless occasions, submitted and seen other people's patches > go neglected for eons in bugzilla. > > It is very discouraging. Whose fault is it? > > Please, do not tell me this is a non-issue. How do you reconcile one's > help and dedication with the reality that patches go ignored for an > unreasonable period--or more often permanently ignored? >
It's a real problem, but I don't think it's anyone's "fault" per se. It's just the reality of a finite number of developers and a huge number of things those developers could be doing or are asked to do. Elijah had some good suggestions. The Linux kernel guys are using Bitkeeper to solve this problem. Firefox was just on slashdot today with apparently the same problem (I don't know if it's true or not). It's not new. Most of the developers would rather write code themselves than spend all their time on patch review, and this is even the right choice in many cases; lots of times the core developers will be doing a large new feature which is more important than lots of small tweaks. Sometimes people just don't like patch review, or a module doesn't really have a maintainer. You can only put so much through a pipe of fixed size. Comes down to physics in the end. But I'd certainly support efforts to try and make the pipe larger. One very good way to help is bug triage. Elijah has shown that with metacity; basically the reason I have trouble with patch review is that it takes too long to find/remember the patches to review, and then actually put them in CVS. Elijah's help reduces my job to just looking at the patch itself, and even though I'm a useless managerial type these days, I can find time to do that. Of course Elijah is also writing a lot of the patches, which doesn't hurt. Havoc _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
