Re: bugzilla cleanup

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Matthias Clasen
<matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Morten Welinder <mortenw gnome org> wrote:
>
>>
>> Note, that there are other large parts of glib, such as gio, that
>> have basically don't work on win32.  And have five-year old
>> patches in bugzilla.
>>
>
> Getting win32 patches merged requires somebody with an interest in
> GLib/GTK+ on that platform to step up and do patch review and
> maintenance. I've never ever built anything on Windows, so I'm not
> really in a position to review patches.

Perhaps we should explore some new possibilities for getting
these patches in.

While I think many of us recognize the value of being
cross-platform and even see it as a high priority for our
stack, many of us (me included), just dont want to actuallypa
run windows on our machines, or... if we use osx, prefer
not to compile there.

On the other hand we still have people willing to submit
patches for bugs which crop up on these platforms.

My initial thoughts are, is there any way to take a different
strategy for reviewing patches on these platforms ?

Perhaps (and this might be far fetched, I don't have
much experience working with VMs so I couldn't say)...
But perhaps it's possible to set up a battery of unit tests
which can be run in a VM... one which can be a requirement
for passing make check (or at least, make distcheck).

If that could work, then we could at least require that,
where possible, a regression test be provided with any
submitted patch... proving that your patch passes the
unit test could be a requirement to landing your patch.

Otherwise, perhaps having a hand full of testimonies
(even >= 2), from various users saying that the patch
works for them, should be enough to land a given
contribution... this would at least be better than stalling
the platform completely (and might even help to attract
someone that we can rely on to review win32 patches
again, stalling the platform is certainly not helping).

I'm not sure that this is exactly the right approach, but
I think we need a technical solution to the problem, since
we probably wont have someone from inside the community
that we trust to review patches, who also wants to build and
test on win32. But that is not to say there is no interest
in win32, obviously submitted patches is proof that there is.

Thoughts ?

Cheers,
             -Tristan