Re: roadmap status update/update request

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2005 11:36:55 -0600, Matt T. Proud <khanreaper nerp net> wrote:
> I do not want to belabor this issue and make any more of you angry, but
> I do think that what you have posed here is still less-than-ideal, for I
> have, on countless occasions, submitted and seen other people's patches
> go neglected for eons in bugzilla.
> 
> It is very discouraging. Whose fault is it?
> 
> Please, do not tell me this is a non-issue. How do you reconcile one's
> help and dedication with the reality that patches go ignored for an
> unreasonable period--or more often permanently ignored?

That is a legitimate problem for some modules that needs to be
addressed (many modules are great at reviewing patches, but some are
really awful, and there's quite a few that could still use
improvement).

Here are the ideas I've had to address it:
- Write a report to track how maintainers are doing at patch review
(done -- see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/patch-diligence-report.cgi;
patch-status.cgi and patch-report.cgi are also useful),
- Make it easier to review patches (see bug 141386; also, documenting
the statuses would be useful--bug 141118)
- It'd be helpful to make it easier to query on patch statuses; we
have some reports to help at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/reports.cgi#maintainers but it'd be
better to have something integrated into query.cgi (despite how huge
that already is...)
- Implement patch nagging (bug 138039)
- Add a miscellanous "see-comments" patch state (two reasons: (1)
sometimes patches don't match any of the given review states and thus
maintainers might not mark them, (2) sometimes the words of the patch
states sound too harsh and maintainers would rather add nice comments
so that they don't discourage contributors instead of marking the
patch as "rejected";  in particular, most "unreviewed" metacity
patches have actually been reviewed and this state would help a lot)
- Add a way of automatically marking a module as unmaintained if
maintainers don't respond to a sufficient percentage of patches and
warning people who add patches to such modules.

Anyway, those are my ideas so far that I will try to tackle as time
permits.  Luis has also sent some general emails to d-d-l and planet
gnome to try to help get things to change.  Other ideas are welcome. 
Assistance even more so.

Elijah