Re: some thoughts about contributing to gnome

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 5/11/05, Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org> wrote:
> Have there been any attempts to identify which non-maintainers
> contributed more than ~3(,4,5,whatever) patches, so that a maintainer
> who urgently needs help can ask them whether they may be interested to
> become a co-maintainer? They don't need to contribute much new code,
> simply accepting patches seems to be great help already.

Hehe, take a look at
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/metacity/ChangeLog?view=markup and check
for occurrences of my name.  I still can't accept patches (well, if
it's "obvious and Rob and I agree" then Havoc says its okay...). 
Having contributed just a handful of patches isn't enough to become a
co-maintainer, typically.  And making someone co-maintainer doesn't
take a lot of effort--anyone that might become a co-maintainer is well
known by the maintainers already, and when the maintainer wants to
bring someone else on board they just have to announce it.

> I noticed that in the last two or three months the number of unreviewed
> patches has been growing rapidly; when I checked a few months ago the
> count was at ~500, now we are close to breaking the 900 barrier.

Evolution and a bunch of other related products were imported, and I
believe that may account for much if not most of that increase.

> Meaning, we will probably soon have even less time to review new
> patches, making the problem even worse. Something needs to be done.

I'm working on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/patch-nag.cgi, with
the idea of periodicially emailing people with a condensed form of
whats in that page and a link to that page...

Elijah