[development] RTBC - how does it work?

[Earl Miles]

John Wilkins wrote:
> The issue then becomes: how do patch developers get the attention of 
> committers or of the committer's web of trust? The only current method 
> is to get it marked RTBC. But then those developers get frustrated as 
> their issues languish in an RTBC queue that is the /self-described/ last 
> step.

There's no single magic way to become trusted, except to have your 
contributions noticed. Being active and having your name appear over and over 
again with good contributions is the way to do it. It's not an overnight 
process, but that's how most of the people in my generation did it. For 
whatever reason, our contributions were noticed.

And it's not just code contributions. Steven Peck and Michelle Cox are both 
well known contributors that don't contribute code at all. (In this case they 
largely contribute documentation and forum support).

Your patch reviews will get noticed if they are thorough and detailed. If your 
review is terse, nobody can tell if it's because you liked things or because 
you didn't. If you go the extra mile and call out things you particularly like 
and things you don't, that can help get noticed.

And a good reviewer is obligated to *thoroughly* understand Drupal's coding 
style. This is probably the part that takes the longest, but by reading lots of 
code and doing lots of reviews, that comes naturally.

I realize that newer people really want to contribute right away. And that's 
great. It's frustrating that it's hard to contribute when newer, and that's a 
problem, but there are a lot of parts about the system that are fixed simply 
with experience. And that experience comes, basically, by being a goat: i.e, 
facing the wall and hitting it, over and over again, until you understand the 
wall. (Yes, that analogy is terrible).