Re: Unreviewed patches - is the boat sinking?

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan upstairslabs com>]

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.

Many have already replied useful things to this, just wanted to add yet
another reason the number 6138 is flawed.

As a general rule, there are two or three useful bug statuses,
UNCONFIRMED, RESOLVED and in some cases, if it really makes you feel
good to use a fancy bug status, you might mark it as NEEDINFO.

The same goes for patch statuses, which are much more of an annoyance
than useful, except for the rare cases where you have 6 patches on the
same bug and it becomes interesting to track the status of each
individual patch.

My guess is that a large portion of this 6138 are actually reviewed but
still unresolved, where the review is done completely in the bug
comments and the reviewer thought better than to waste a precious 20
extra seconds on clicking through extra pages in order to mark the bug
status as "reviewed".

Cheers,
    -Tristan

> 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
>
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