At 10:43 AM -0700 2002/10/04, Taylor, Jason wrote:
>Maybe we can come up with some process of reviewing patches so that
>struts-dev subscribers can take care of some of the quality control tasks
>and committers can review the reviews, if that makes sense. Struts is so
>good at divvying up work between people and creating specialized tasks that
>somehow make up a development process, it seems appropriate that the process
>of managing the framework itself should benefit from similar specialization.
>
>Is there anything we can do to help committers review patches? Maybe people
>could post their own digests of the bug list that prioritize bugs, scope the
>issues and give their opinions on the possible solutions or the posted
>patches that are available. We could also find bugs that we recommend be
>dismissed to get them off the list. Maybe morale would improve if there was
>a sense that the effort required was actually *not* infinite.
I'm not a committer, but here are some reactions:
First, any process-heavy approach is unlikely to succeed in an
all-volunteer environment. However, I think you can achieve some of
the things you have in mind just by energizing non-committers who
share you concerns about the rate at which patches get applied.
For example, bugzilla allows people to vote for various issues. If
the community was known to use this feature, the committers would
probably use the number votes as a way to help them prioritize open
bugs.
Also, bugzilla allows anyone to add commentary to a posted issues.
Non-committers could post annotations indicating how they've tested
out a proposed patch.
And, non-committers could post test cases to add to the current
Struts suite so that it becomes easier for everyone to recognize
whether proposed patches or other changes have an impact on what has
gone before.
Finally, non-committers can develop a level of comfort with CVS tools
so that they can apply patches to their own copy of the CVS tree and
maintain a tree which may be slightly divergent from the official CVS
head so that they can continue to use changes in other source until
their patches are applied.
All that said, an occasional annotated summary of active bugs might
be helpful to all developers. If you're interested, I'd suggest just
whipping one up and posting it and seeing what people think -- that's
generally how things get done around here. Look at David Karr -- a
few months ago he waltzes up and says "I'm thinking about applying
the JSTL expression language to Struts taglibs"; a bit of discussion
ensues, David goes back and puts his head down and cranks out working
code... and now he's a committer! :-)
Joe
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* Joe Germuska { [EMAIL PROTECTED] }
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often feel that a dope peddler is a gentleman compared with the man
who sells records."
--Sam Goody, 1956
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