On 02 Jul 2007, at 21:05, Augustin (Beginner) wrote:
My main point is: please do listen to people who are better known than I am, when they talk about some overdue systemic changes.
The main reason that keeps patches from getting committed faster is the lack of good reviews. The main challenge is to increase the amount and the quality of patch reviews and to reduce the number of silly "+1"s. People posting a "+1" waste a lot of people's time -- it makes dozens of people recheck the issue, and it does not buy you any more respect or trust. If we can stop posting "+1"s (or "subscribe"s for that matter), that would save me some time, it would increase the signal to noise ratio and it would avoid the false sense of support. We should also change the perception that RTBC means "a core committer needs to look at this". When a patch is RTBC, it still means that everyone needs to look at it, and that's part of the reason why many patches are still in the RTBC queue. I'll try to be faster to send back these to the "code needs (better) review" status, if that helps. Ultimately, this is something everyone can help with. If a patch is in RTBC for too long, it probably means it could use more quality reviews. Maybe we need a 'decay feature' that sets a patch back to 'code needs review' after 2 weeks as RTBC? During the next couple of weeks, I'll pay close attention to my workflow and usage patterns surrounding the issue queues. I'll try to gather some statistics of why patches are rejected, and how much time is spent doing what. How frequently do I revisit an issue, and how often that means something useful was added to the issue? Things like that. I'll also keep an eye open for things that would help us. Automatically checking whether a patch still applies would be useful already. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/