PRs are being closed for bogus reasons :-(

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 8:10 AM, Bob Bishop <rb at gid.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > On 31 May 2018, at 22:14, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> >
> > --------
> > In message <CANCZdfovyg61=b0-60ZD426Z=774Wxm9hJxZ=bSqReW_fD4DoA@
> mail.gmail.com>
> > , Warner Losh writes:
> >
> >> There's a problem with the PR database: there's too many bugs.
> >
> > And despite the valiant efforts of a number of people over the
> > lifetime of the project, it has always had so many bugs that
> > everybody just threw their hands in the air and walked away.
> >
> > The way to improve the situation is to fix PR's, not to complain
> > about PRs.
>
> Indeed. But look at the number of PRs with patches that are stuck in that
> state. Not pretty.
>

Over the years I've committed dozens of PRs that had patches in them. The
sad truth is that only about 10-15% of them have comitable patches in them
when submitted. And that number decays over time as things age in bugzilla.
I have approached things with enthusiasm 3 or 4 times over the years, only
to be disappointed in how many I could actually commit, and how much work
it took me to find those to commit. There's maybe another 30% that could be
committed with less than an hour or two worth of work on them. Regardless
of how good you think a fix is, there's the matter of regressions from
these fixes. While people can point to really good patches stuck in PRs for
a long time, I can point to lots of really bad ones. Separating out the
wheat from the chaff is tedious, time consuming and not at all fun.

The situation is a lot better these days since we have at least the start
of a good regression suite we can use to proof changes (eg, did this tweak
to awk break it, or fix it, or as I've discovered too many times, both...
but we don't have a good regression suite for awk yet).

Warner