PR backlog

[Remko Lodder]

Hello Warner et all,

On Wed, December 26, 2007 7:42 pm, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> Mark and Henrik make a number of good points here.  Rather than reply
> to the details, I'm going to make a couple of quick observations.
>
> As a project we're not leveraging the community sufficiently when it
> comes to contributions.  The current system of patch review and
> submission is very hap-hazard.  If you happen to get the attention of
> the right person at the right time, then it goes in.  If not, patches
> can languish a long time in the PR system.

Indeed, I am one of the persons trying to find these relatively easy
things which I can do along side my other projects and things, but I dont
see them all (eventhough I try to keep track of them as much as possible);
but what will happen is that I learn more and more about the system and at
some point in time I will "stop" working on these easy PR's and seeking
more difficult ones to fix, at that point someone else has to step up to
fill in the gap that gets created; this might be a problematic part :-)

Though for everyone having simple fixes, please send them to me so that I
can evaluate them and (together with Warner in this case (As my mentor)) I
will try to get them in as correctly and quickly as possible :-) (keeping
up with the high standards of FreeBSD ofcourse).

>
> The PR system is also the wrong tool for the job.  While Mark touches
> on the cultural issues in play, they are exacerbated by the
> misapplication of a problem system to be a patch submission and
> tracking system.  Maybe we need to adopt a practice from the Linux
> community.  At least for arm kernel patches, there is a two step
> process: submit it to a mailing list for review and refinement, with
> the second step being submitting it into a queue.  I'm not sure the
> details we need to be successful in the FreeBSD project.
>
> Many of the USB patches in the PR system I left alone because I didn't
> have the time and/or knowledge to evaluate them for inclusion, or I
> saw something obviously wrong in the patch.  When I was trying to just
> get through the obviously trivial patches.
>
> Warner

Some things that I think need to be done by the bugbuster/bugmeister team
and additional people is a constant effort to keep track of the incoming
tickets; Mark does a great job at that, and I try to helpout as much as
possible there, but we are all busy every now and then and then a backlog
on processing the incoming tickets gets created and we loose the "battle"
:-)

This is where you (the reader) can get in and try to help us with that, so
that we can properly assign the tickets, and try to keep track of them so
that they can get resolved as soon as possible.

Though, some complains are that we are not fast enough etc, I think we
need to make sure that everyone keeps understanding that we are a
Voluntary project, and that we have resources at unknown times and dates,
a committer can be active the one day, and remain inactive the rest of the
week; that's a side effect on the project being based on volunteers; we
did a good job so far with that, but every now and then something slips in
between. What we should do at that point is not ranting around as I see
happen sometimes, but instead try to get the bugbusters / bugmeister team
involved so that we can see what other options are available, sometimes we
can succeed in and sometimes we cannot; but dont keep the problem to
yourself and the "assigned" person because that might not work :-)

Just my E 0,02 :-)

-- 
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