[development] What about reviewing patches?

[Frank Steiner]

andrew morton wrote

> Well I haven't had time for either but since you asked... I've burned
> out on reviewing because I'd get excited about a patch try to help it
> along and then.... nothing... it just gets ignored and never committed
> or commented on by a committer. Sort of hard to stay motivated to keep
> throwing good time after bad.

Although I haven't either submitted nor reviewed patches for drupal core,
I can acknowledge this point because I see this with modules. Many of
the modules I need for 6.x were still in beta or not even upgraded to
6.x, so I tried to write and patch a lot of stuff by myself. With some
modules, I got feedback quite fast and so I went on patching and improving
for those.
But when you spent two weeks full-time work to add a feature (like attaching 
files for comments to use that in forums) and then get nothing but silence
for weeks, not even a "I will look at or test this", then you definitely
lose motivation to do any other patch for this module. I'm not blaming
module maintainers for this, since they might just not have enough time
to care about all this or more important things (or "real life" :-)) to do 
or whatever.

Although this is the view from the other side, I'm sure this is the same 
reviewing. People just want feedback about work they did, otherwise they
are disappointed and stop contributing.

cu,
Frank

-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner   Web:  http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/
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