[development] Intelligent use of time (Re: Perm for setting RTBC

[Jeff Eaton]

On Jul 3, 2007, at 9:56 AM, Fernando Silva wrote:

> 8. core developers will start to do their job of commiting patches

This is a point of much contention, however. Your statement implies  
that a core committer is "The guy who's supposed to press the  
'commit' button after everyone decides what should happen." With that  
line of thinking, yes, a core committer is 'not their job' if they  
don't commit RTBC patches.

The fundamental problem, though, is that a core committer is also  
'the final reviewer,' the last line of defense between Drupal core  
and conceptually flawed code. The system works best when core  
committers don't *have* to spend a lot of time on that part of their  
role. And that's what breaks when the queue gets saturated with  
premature RTBC's. Their role as 'final reviewer' sucks up more and  
more time, and fewer patches can get the attention necessary to make  
the commit happen.