On 12 Jan 2003, Eric Anholt wrote: >> You know I never for the life of me understood that. I would have thougtht >> that every developer would be interested and see if their patch bumped horns >> with another. >> As former postmaster I received, I think, a total of two requests. Weird. >> >> Georgina > >Who's the new postmaster? I sent in my request to be added to patch@ >six days ago, but no response so far. > >Also, is there any reason for the standard patch-queue list to be >private? If it's destined for the public source tree, why not make it >subscribable through mailman, too?
Which would also have the benefit of patches being useable and testable by other people in the wild without waiting for XFree86.org to have volunteer time to review and possibly apply a patch. Also, someone might submit a patch, that isn't perfectly correct, have it sit in the patch queue for 1 month, or possibly 4 or more months, and in the mean time change hardware or circumstance and not care about the issue any more. Then if an XFree86.org CVS commiter goes to review it, and finds something that needs fixing (but isn't able or perhaps willing to do it themselves), assuming they do try to notify the person who submitted it - what if the person's email address is no longer valid? What if they do contact the person and the person no longer cares? Publically visible patches, mean that other people can test them and use them right away and provide feedback on wether or not the patch does what it says it does. Some people will also be able to vouch for the correctness of the patch. This would relieve some of the things that people who apply patches to the repository need to do first, and it would also get more patches more widespread testing. How much end user testing do patches get that were submitted 6 months before they were applied, and then a release shipped only a couple of months or so later? Perhaps between the time it was applied and the time it shipped, nobody even tested it. Also, more and more desktop oriented users are springing up. They aren't really compile-it-yourself types, so if they report a bug, they might not see if it is fixed until the next release (or erratum) from their given distro comes out. By having patch lists public, it enables more people who are compile savvy to test things earlier, and allows more feedback to be given to the tree maintainers of what is good, and what sucks, helping them to trim down their workload by calling crap crap earlier in the cycle. -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
