Richard Guenther wrote:
Indeed - we do not need another piece of infrastructure. Note that good
patch review takes a lot of time and we (unfortunately again) do not have
many active patch reviewers. So it happens that patches from people
with excellent track history get approved quickly but others are just
left behind. Pinging the patches does usually help here, as well as
working with maintainers during the patch creation so that the final
review is easy.
Richard.
This all sounds like a typical "dead-lock" problem. The projects
obviously needs more patch reviewers, but to be qualified for a patch
reviewer, you clearly require a _thorough_ understanding of the GCC
internals. And I think to get this deep knowledge - at least for my
person - I need the motivation to look and work through the source code
to understand the internals. And to get this motivation or keep it up
and running, I need to work productively on this project by submitting
patches among others. Documentation is important and could make fun as
well, but the real fun is to work on the code and submit - at one time -
patches to the main line.
All the mentioned aspects sound somehow devastating for me that it is
_that_ hard to get into the real contribution and I could generally
understand that a lot of persons decided to NOT contribute.
Although some might think this is stupid SPAM, I think this thread is
really good (Thanks Manuel!) to get an overview of the current
"problems" of the GCC projects and what could be improved so that the
project becomes more attractive to potential contributors.
A patch tracking system might basically be a good idea for contributors
but it nevertheless doesn't solve the real problem, the limited amount
and time of the patch reviewers!!!
