Unreviewed patches - is the boat sinking?

[Joanna Larsen <oaksparc gmail com>]

Hello.

I'm new to Gnome. Some time ago I started looking into the inner workings of it. Reading the source code, learning from it. Coming up with a few ideas. So I jumped on Bugzilla eager to fix bugs and contribute features.

Until I found this [1]. No it's not the list of open bug reports, it's the list of unreviewed patches. As of now that's 6138 in total.

Hundreds or thousands of people have taken the time to create a patch, submit it and then heard absolutely nothing back. Any free software project would crave for even this many contributions alone.

I'm sure it's possible to contribute to Gnome. But this number tells newcomers very clearly that there's no point in submitting patches, they won't be reviewed.

How do we solve this?

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=patchreport.html&patch-status=none