Re: some thoughts about contributing to gnome

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

Hi,

> First I went through the (freshly created, back then) simple-bug list. I
> estimate that at least 50% of the bugs were IMO marked "gnome-love"
> falsely, because they either required discussion, required deep
> knowledge about many components IMO, or already had a patch attached.
> Some of that seemed to be the result of renaming "easy-fix" keyword,
> which was sometimes used in situations that may not be too suited for
> newbies.

Yeah, easy-fix was abused, but we just changed easy-fix to gnome-love
without ferreting out the ones that had been marked invalidly, at
least not at first.

> So today I went through the list again to find those bugs and write them
> down. The situation seems to have improved quite since then, but I still

I manually went through the list a while later and tried to kick off
which ones I could--I'm sure I missed several, and there were a few
cases where I kicked off ones that I shouldn't (I hope the maintainers
caught all of those).

> found plenty. Note that I was not picky to add something to the list and
> if something was unclear that alone qualified a bug to appear here,
> because I believe that especially gnome-love bugs should have a clear
> description of what needs to be done:

Sweet, thanks for going through the list.  Unfortunately, I don't have
a lot of time, but it'd be great if someone could go through the list
and either kick some of these off the list or clean them up a bit.

<snip>
 
> Patch:

The gnome-love report specifically lists exactly how many patches each
bug report has.  Having a patch does not mean that the report should
automatically be kicked off the list, because the patch may be
obsolete or rejected (we didn't use to have patch statuses, so it may
be hard to tell whether one of these is true without reading the
comments).  However, perhaps I should make the report not list bugs
with unreviewed patches anyway?  That sounds fairly reasonable--it may
cut some valid bugs off the list (which is what I was worried about),
but it'd probably kill an awful lot of "noise" as well, judging from
the size of your list.

> 2. Patches are often not being reviewed. I submitted some 4 or 5
> patches, only one very trivial patch of which was since reviewed (kudos
> to the Gimp developers); this was > two months ago.
> 
> I am deliberately not pointing to those bugs to make clear that these
> are not the intention of this email. Knowing that there are 600
> unreviewed patches in bugzilla I am trying to point to the general
> problem instead: Some people complain that there are no new developers
> getting involved in GNOME, but looking at the number of patches I
> believe there are - they are only not being accepted.
> So yes, I know the number of bug reports is huge, but *please*, bugs
> with patches should have a strong priority.

Absolutely agreed (although I have to hang my own head in shame over
some of the patches I've let slip without looking at...).  A couple
questions.  We've pinged d-d-l a few times about this.  My question to
you is: do you have any ideas about how we could be more effective at
getting developers to review patches?  I've had a couple ideas (which
I've done some work at implementing), but I'd like to hear yours.

Thanks for your work!

Elijah