FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On 18 January 2012 00:00, Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Just a note: the next best thing you can to _not_ have a patch committed is to
> just open a PR and stop at that.  The best thing being not sharing the patch at
> all :-)

[snip]

> Some things that help:
> - send a problem description and a patch (or a short description and a link to a
> PR) to a relevant mailing list
> - maintain a discussion of the patch if it arises
> - try to be interesting and keep the interested folks hooked
> - find some folks who recently committed stuff in the area of the patch and
> contact them directly
> - don't just wait for too long, remind about yourself and the patch, try
> different mailing lists/people
> - never give up
> - stay technical, never get bitter or overly emotional
> - don't refuse when offered a commit bit :-)

Seriously, WTF is the point of having a PR system that allows patches
to be submitted??! When I submit a patch I fix *your* code (not yours
personally, but you get my gist). No other project requires a
non-committer to be so ridiculously persistent in order to get a patch
through.

Such system is plainly wrong---it simply discourages people from
sending "this works for me"(TM) fixes. The committers have to realise
three things: they can and do write broken code now and then, most
people who write patches to help the fBSD along don't have the time to
become full time committers (otherwise they'd already be, right?), and
there's only so many times one is willing to bang their head against a
wall with no results---as Einstein pointed out "Insanity: doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting different results"...

I'm not saying that responding to reasonable requests from people who
are in the process of testing and committing the patch, but expecting
the end-users to chase committers to have a fix included is plainly
wrong!..


--
Igor M.