Re: some thoughts about contributing to gnome

[Vincent Untz <vincent vuntz net>]

Le mercredi 11 mai 2005 �0:49 +0200, Samuel Abels a �it :
> Am Dienstag, den 10.05.2005, 16:25 -0600 schrieb Elijah Newren:
> > 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 am probably going to make myself unpopular, but I would suggest
> regular notifications (once per 48 hours) on bugs that have a new
> attachment and have not been confirmed. (Implement an automatic "cvs
> commit" right remover for those who do not review their product's
> patches properly and you also get my vote ;-).)

It seems there is a specific problem you're not considering here:
maintainers that are volunteers. This is my case and sometimes I just
don't have time to look at bugzilla. The perfect example is right now:
I've not looked at bugzilla (nor committed a lot of code) since 2.10.1
because I'm busy with real life, but I'll be definitely coming back in a
few days/weeks. And I'm sure that maintainers employed by some companies
who maintain many modules have the same problem.

Sending more mails won't help me: I'm already receiving tons of bugzilla
mails and I perfectly know how to find patches in bugzilla. Telling me I
should review patches quickly won't help me either: I know this but I
don't have time right now and I just can't. And I know this is a problem
for newcomers. I'm blaming myself everyday for not reviewing patches.
I'm even ashamed to go to GUADEC with so many bugs and no new features
in 2.11!

Right now, there are 171 open bugs for the panel. It used to be ~140.
There are 39 opened bugs per week. This is just too much.

Although Elijah, Olav, Kjartan and others are doing a great job at
closing all the duplicates (guys, you're really heroes), I'm always
getting more bugs. Unless I start working full-time (or maybe half-time)
on the panel, I won't be able to look at all those bugs, fix them and
close them.

I need more time or more panel developers. More time won't happen.

I don't have any real proposition. Maybe we should help newcomers
understand how hard it is for maintainers to have all those bugs and
deal with them. Or maybe we should have a maintainer status page so
newcomers at least know when they'll have an answer: "maintainer is busy
right now, he will come back to check your patches on May 22nd"...

Vincent

-- 
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