[development] How to post bug reports and patches

[Angela Byron]

It's a fair question. When the Drupal community is at some 385,000+ 
people and there are some 5,500+ issues contending for attention, it can 
be difficult for the issues that you think are important to gain visibility.

Some tips that should help, anyway:

* File issues against the latest version of Drupal to have the problem. 
For example, if it happens in 6.x and 7.x, file it under 7.x instead; 
the latest version is always where most core developers are focusing, 
and once they get in to a later release, it's a lot easier to make the 
case for it belonging in earlier ones (and easier to commit the patch 
too, since it's already been vetted).

* Hang out on IRC in #drupal, and watch for someone asking for a patch 
review. Tell them you'd be happy to review their patch if they could 
review yours.

* We are always desperately short on patch reviewers. So if you 
consistently do awesome patch reviews as often as you can, and you will 
get escalated to the very tippy-top of the community karma scale very, 
very quickly. There are good tips about this at 
http://drupal.org/patch/review.

Hope that helps, I'm about to get on a plane so didn't get a chance to 
look at those issues in particular, but these are some general tips.

-Angie

Markus Kalkbrenner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is my first post to this list so I will introduce myself first.
> My name is Markus Kalkbrenner. I'm developing software for more than 15 years 
> and participating in open source projects since 7 years.
> Two years ago I started working with drupal and posted my first bug reports 
> and patches.
> 
> Currently I'm asking myself which is the right strategy to contribute patches 
> and get them committed to CVS because most of the time I'm still working with 
> drupal 5 and find bugs there.
> 
> Just some examples:
> 
> Posted 4 month ago for drupal 5.7:
> http://drupal.org/node/229411 node_view() incompatible to php5
> 
> I was asked to add more comments to my patch and drumm found out that the same 
> bug still exists in drupal 6. So I added the comments but nothing happend. 
> Neither in D5 nor in D6.
> 
> 
> Posted 3 month ago for drupal 5.8
> http://drupal.org/node/287063 node_delete memory leak and wrong order of 
> commands
> 
> In a different bug I was told to post the bugs for drupal 6 to get them 
> handled faster and finally backported to drupal 5. So I switched the version 
> for this issue to D6 and added an additional patch for it. But no reaction.
> 
> 
> Posted 3 month ago for drupal 6.dev
> http://drupal.org/node/298768 Ensure that entries are written to watchdog 
> table
> and
> http://drupal.org/node/298678 Impossible to lock two MySQL tables
> 
> From my point of view these are two serious issues which are the reason for 
> several other bug reports. I found them in drupal 5 but discovered that they 
> still exist in D6 and D7. So I decided to post them for D6 because this is 
> the current stable version. Unfortunately I didn't see any reaction so far.
> 
> 
> Please don't get me wrong. I really like drupal and will keep on contributing 
> patches because I want to improve it.
> But maybe I'm doing something wrong or you just have no time to maintain the 
> stable versions. So for me the current situation is like a "bad user 
> experience".