[development] How to post bug reports and patches

[Darren Oh]

After chatting with greggles, I should make clear that I can guess why  
core maintainers would do this because as a project maintainer I have  
been guilty of exactly the same thing. There are four bottlenecks in  
project maintenance:

1. People who complain outnumber people to read complaints.
2. People who read complaints outnumber people who provide patches.
3. People who provide patches outnumber people who review patches.
4. People who review patches outnumber people who commit patches.

This means a maintainer spends a lot of time sifting through issues  
and trying to consolidate them to the few that are helpful. A  
maintainer's frustration is that most users focus on bottleneck 4 when  
the other three are just as important.

On Oct 30, 2008, at 10:42 AM, Darren Oh wrote:

> Most often patches are ignored when they are not relevant to the  
> development version of Drupal. Bugs are sometimes labeled feature  
> requests by maintainers who are not interested in fixes that only  
> apply to older versions. In effect they're saying, This doesn't need  
> to be fixed. You got it to work for you, and other people can wait  
> for the next version of Drupal.
>
> Only a few core maintainers behave this way, probably because they  
> are trying to shorten the patch queue, but their comments discourage  
> other developers from getting involved.