From: Paul Louden <paulthenerd_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:20:37 -0500

Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> I know I would pay attention to POTW patches, while I hardly ever look
> at the stream of patches. I think there mere fact that someone puts in
> some work to select a few "important enough" ones is the deciding
> factor for me personally.
I'm not so sure. There's a list of patches that get brought up, again
and again, and are considered (by many) the most important ones. Bitmap
resize, Multifont, Viewport Lists, Accessory Protocol, Sansa Charging,
and Software USB. Despite being important ones, they've never gone in,
for one reason or another. In fact as far as I know, there's no reason
Accessory Protocol shouldn't except that most of us just don't have any
ability to test it ourselves first to get comfortable with it.

What the patches need, more than "general attention" is someone willing
to do the actual work behind it if there is something we don't like.
PoTW doesn't provide that person. I think finding "important" patches is
easy. It's the unimportant ones, that may be good but just sound boring,
that really slip through the tracks. The important ones inspire debate,
then hit a brick wall, but we all more or less know about them. The
littler ones, rather, never get seen and so rot away just because nobody
cared to stop and comment on them at all.

If we asked authors "post the patch to the tracker, but if you think
it's ready and aren't receiving comments, and are willing to address any
problems, bring it to us on the mailing list" it provides a way for
*every* patch to get extra attention, and at the same time we'd see if
there are volunteers to actually fix it or not.
Received on 2008-10-02