Re: Unreviewed patches - is the boat sinking?

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sun, 2014-04-13 at 09:34 +0200, Joanna Larsen wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, have you actually checked that? How do you know that this is the
case. For example:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724299
contains 19 patches, all of which will get reviewed after we've branched
from GNOME 3.12.

The majority of patches against Totem were submitted by me:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=patchreport.html&product=totem&patch-status=none
Parked and waiting for branching as well.

And your list of patches mention plenty of obsolete modules.

>  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.

That's a flippant attitude when you should actually be looking at
patches on a case-by-case basis.

> How do we solve this?

Reviewing the patches on a case by case basis would be helpful. Plenty
of those bugs should be NEEDINFO (and the patches hidden from your
list), plenty don't apply or aren't relevant anymore. But you'll need to
set aside your idea that _all_ those patches are forgotten. Some might
be but they're the exception rather than the rule.

Cheers

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