Re: patches and responses...

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

kevin lyda <kevin@suberic.net> writes:
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 05:57:42PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > So my suggestion is to set up a cron job that mails the people listed
> > as authors of gnome-terminal once per week. Seriously.
> 
> er, i just want to submit a few lines of code, i don't want to spam
> people.  can i quote you on this?
> 
> wait, this is silly,
> 
> i think that's a very sorry state of affairs.  i don't want to rile people
> up, but i'm hearing from more than a few people that gnome development
> is very cliquish and closed.  that doesn't bode well for the project.
> when i went to uni i mainly used bsd boxen and after uni dug about and
> finally found freebsd.
>

Yeah I agree. The problem is that some packages are essentially
unmaintained. There are several forms of this: a) the original
maintainer disappeared b) there are so many maintainers that none of
them has clear responsibility so no one does anything c) no one is
sure who the maintainer is. gnome-terminal is probably b) or
c). Anyway, so I suggest mailing all the people who've ever worked on
it until one of them does something. Because one of them should do
something, if only say "OK none of us are maintaining it, please mail
foo@bar.com"

I wouldn't describe this as "clique", just "lack of organization." 
I try to respond quickly for the stuff I maintain; I'm not sure what
else to do, I can't authorize you to put code in someone else's
package. :-(

We're trying to get more organized with the foundation, etc. But
people are very busy.

I guess that's another category, the packages where the maintainers
are just so overloaded it takes a month before they can read a patch.

The bug tracker is a good place to put things, when it works, because
then someone has to get in and close the bug eventually, and your
patch won't get lost. We're working on getting a working tracker
running.

But, for speedy results the best thing is just to keep pestering the
authors/maintainers until they give you an answer. FWIW I hear Linux
works this way, rumor has it Linus deletes all mail that hasn't been
resent a few times. ;-)

Not an excuse, just an explanation...

Havoc