Re: Unreviewed patches - is the boat sinking?

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 12:34 AM, Joanna Larsen <oaksparc gmail com> 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. Any free software project
> would crave for even this many contributions alone.

It would be nice if you didn't have such an alarmist subject.
Clearly, the boat isn't sinking when there are so many active
maintainers.  Your search isn't quite accurate as you've indicated
because you've pulled in all the GNOME 2 components like
gnome-applets.  To normalize it you should get a list of components
that is part of the GNOME 3 platform and then search against them.

> 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.

Taking a simple search which results are not accurate and then
interpreting them as we don't care about new contributors is a poor
way to introduce yourself to this list.  Like most metrics, the devil
is always in the details.  Metrics never tell the full human story.
As you saw from this thread there are some libraries that are
unmaintained or not active.  These are excellent opportunities in fact
to take over and make them maintained especailly if you care enough
about the library to write patches.  Free Software requires at certain
points to take initiative.

It's disapointing to me that you've decided to approach this as we don't care.

> How do we solve this?

Let's start with an actual set of metrics that is accurate.  If there
is an issue and certainly if you care about it, we have a team called
the bug squad who can look into it.  We solve these problems by
getting volunteers to help manage the bug queue and bug maintainers.
This problem is not unique and is in fact a problem in any Free
Software project.

sri