Need for patch coordination

[Owen Taylor <owt1 cornell edu>]

We're getting a lot of patches these days. There seems to 
be a need for a bit more coordination about handling them.

As an example, some patches to gtkaspectframe.c were posted
a little while ago by George Dairiki. Feeling somewhat 
responsible for that code, I incorporated them into my tree,
working out some (minor) improvements with their originator. 

I would have have committed them over the weekend, given
the opportunity. I now notice that Jay has (quite reasonably)
gone ahead and applied the patches.

In this case, the amount of effort wasted was pretty small, 
but it can add up. And it might be more significant in
some cases.

I don't know if we need a full bug tracking system at this
point. Perhaps all that is needed is for people to post to this
list when they have "adopted" a patch. (Not necessary of course,
if it is immediately being committed.) It's a bit of a noisy
solution, since it doesn't concern most of the people on the
list. But in lieu of something better ...

In that spirit, I'll announce now that I'm working on Takashi 
Matsuda's XIM patch, and hopefully will have something ready
fairly soon.

Regards,
                                        Owen