[development] What about reviewing patches?

[Derek Wright]

On Aug 14, 2008, at 10:29 AM, 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.
>
> 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.

As someone who's done an awful lot of core patch reviews over the  
years, I feel compelled to chime in here.

If we've got a single bottleneck on the RTBC queue, how is mustering  
the forces of 2000+ people to exacerbate that problem going to help  
anything?  Things sitting in RTBC are a *HUGE* waste of developer  
time.  The sheer volume of hours wasted by things having to be re- 
rolled since they were RTBC once but no one committed for months is  
mind boggling.  Not to mention the cascading effect of other patches  
that are constantly re-rolled when something finally does get in.

I'm certainly not motivated to work in the core issue queue much  
anymore, except out of necessity.  I've just wasted far too many  
hours re-rolling, re-wrangling reviews, etc, etc, trying to get  
something in.  So long as things sit in RTBC for weeks on end,  
there's very little motivation for me (and clearly many others) to  
try to get stuff from CNR to RTBC.

The point of patches and patch reviews are to improve Drupal.  That  
only happens once a patch *lands*.  So long as one person is the  
bottleneck for patches landing, there's no point in shaming,  
moralizing, or otherwise cajoling people to review more patches.

Given a single maintainer, I think the core development workflow  
should make more use of the patch spotlight[1] and be something like:

- Dries says the 1-5 patches he cares about and is willing to follow  
and comment on at any given time.
- People who want to help core work on those patches until they're  
*committed*.
- i++;

Just about anything else is a giant waste of time it seems.

Cheers,
-Derek (dww)

[1] http://drupal.org/patch/spotlight