On Tue, 14 May 2002, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote:

>There are about a handful of people who see these patches,
>I'm not sure that any of them are paid to work on XFree86,
>so you are asking a volounteer developer to spend time
>understanding someone else's patch (including the issues involved)
>and then do the boring administrative stuff of integrating it.

Indeed, and it is understandable that volunteer work can only 
accomplish so much in a given amount of time.  I think the 
problem is not that patches/fixes don't get integrated instantly, 
but rather that there is no two way communication mechanism 
present.  An automated system can help with this.


>I think code cutting is fun, but I wouldn't enjoy integrating patches.

I also agree with that.  When a bug report comes into bugzilla,
once I am looking into the issue, I have the bug number on hand,
and have it open in a web browser.  Once the fix is applied -
either included with the bug report, or whipped up or from
elsewhere, I can then make a comment in the report which takes
virtually zero time/effort "fixed in 4.2.0-9 in rawhide, please
reopen if the problem persists" or somesuch, and click
"CLOSED->RAWHIDE" or some other resolution that is fitting.

The end user receives an email on this, as do any other people 
who have added themselves to the bug CC list, informing them the 
issue is resolved.  It takes me no more time to do this, than it 
would to read an email, fix a bug, add a changelog entry.  I 
think the gains it brings far outweigh any /perceived/ 
disadvantages by far.  If I were running a large project on a 
volunteer basis, I would definitely use bugzilla to manage it, as 
it saves time, rather than requiring more time.

If all projects using bugzilla didn't result in more being done
in less time, by those same volunteers they likely wouldn't use
it at all IMHO if it just created more work.


-- 
Mike A. Harris                  Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer             190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
XFree86 maintainer              Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
Red Hat Inc.
http://www.redhat.com           ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris

_______________________________________________
Xpert mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert

Reply via email to