From: Frank Gevaerts <frank_at_gevaerts.be>
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:19:02 +0200

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 06:00:18PM +1000, Jonathan Gordon wrote:
> 1) the author has gone, the patch might be great but if noone wants to
> take ownership of the patch it is going to be left to rot (either on
> the tracker or in svn)

Yes, there's not much we can do about that I think, except possibly
vague things like "encourage more people to look at the tracker"

> 2) every patch will have someone saying this maybe isnt a good idea
> (for any number of reasons)

This is also true for any other commit that doesn't go through the patch
tracker. This is where "A committer has to take responsibility" comes
in.

> 3) most of the patches everyone is indifferent to, but we dont want to
> import 300 patches in one hit!

True, but I don't think that will happen anyway.

> 4) author hasnt given us his full name, patch is ready to go otherwise
> but cant be accepted

Or related reasons, e.g. FS#4755 (the wikipedia viewer) where the patch
is based on code with unknown origin.

Maybe we could add some statuses to flyspray to reflect this (and
actually use flyspray statuses a bit more effectively). That won't help
much directly, but being able to quickly see for which tasks it actually
makes sense to spend time might encourage more people to actually spend
time on patches.

> 5) patches are still a bit of a pain to actually commit (download,
> merge, sync, commit with the correct formatted message)

Is that really the case? I've never seen that as a real problem

Frank

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Received on 2010-08-24