On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Angela Byron wrote:
True. But exactly *one* person can do something about the RTBC queue. 2,000+ people can do something about the CNR queue.
I think the main issue /at the moment/ is that this is probably the longest in several releases that there's only been one person able to do anything about the RTBC queue. Drupal 5 was released on January 15th 2007 [1], Gabor was given commit access on April 17, 2007[2], three months later. Drupal 6 was released on February 13, 2008 [3], it's now 6 months later and there's no sign of a branch maintainer yet. Additionally, the last core commit by Steven Wittens was July 26, 2007 [4], three weeks after code freeze [5] - so there's actually two less people committing to HEAD than during the Drupal 6 code thaw, and Gabor was employed full time working by Acquia just to work on core commits from August [6] as well. However, even with three core committers, or two and one person employed full time, reviews have always been the primary bottleneck.
Let's have a community outcry about the RTBC queue once the situation is reversed, and we have 325 patches waiting for core committers' blessing, and only 40 patches that need community review. Until then, we have work to do.
-Angie
It's pretty easy to make a difference to the RTBC queue as well, at least when it's as long as it is now, I just went through everything that had been untouched for 5 weeks or more, bumped everything that still applied, found 2-3 that needed re-rolling, and one that was in entirely the wrong queue. Quite a few patches left would probably get in easier if they had simpletests written for them too - so people could find those and help them out if simpletests are missing. For now, RTBC patches against D7 are down to ~ 30 from over twice that a few days ago (there's been some commits as well recently, although 30 is still quite a lot considering many of them are heavily tested and nearly all should be valid against HEAD). We'll see if it goes up or down from here. Like you said, a review queue of about 40 would be pretty good - as long as the RTBC queue goes down by the same proportion (about 5-15). Would be much, much less work nursing patches once the initial pain was over with. Nat [1] http://drupal.org/node/109494 [2] http://buytaert.net/gabor-hojtsy [3] http://drupal.org/node/221219 [4] http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=74849 [5] http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-code-freeze [6] http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2008-feb-15/drupal-6-maintainers-perspective