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Re: Patch queue and reviewing (Was Re: Generator programs can only be built with optimization enabled?)
- From: Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>
- To: Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>
- Cc: Mike Stump <mrs at apple dot com>, Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>, Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou at libertysurf dot fr>, Paolo Bonzini <paolo dot bonzini at lu dot unisi dot ch>, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>, GCC Patches <gcc-patches at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 09:21:08 +0200 (CEST)
- Subject: Re: Patch queue and reviewing (Was Re: Generator programs can only be built with optimization enabled?)
- References: <448C7B05.8030109@codesourcery.com> <448D9BE9.6020805@codesourcery.com> <448E652E.1080602@lu.unisi.ch> <200606131002.27752.ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> <448F8170.2050402@dberlin.org> <96F5A03B-F997-4859-BD28-F71727B6313B@apple.com> <20060614185149.GF21013@synopsys.com>
Hi,
On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, Joe Buck wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 11:34:33AM -0700, Mike Stump wrote:
> > I'd welcome the issue be addressed by the SC. I'd favor more timely
> > reviews. Maybe auto approval for a patch that sits for more than a
> > week? :-)
>
> I see your smilie, Mike, but GCC would rapidly decay into a pile of
> random bytes, unable to build itself, much less anything else, under such a
> policy.
Not necessarily. There are other (bigger but perhaps not as complicated)
open source projects, which work under a much more open scheme. It
doesn't need to be an everything-goes. It could be something like trusted
people can commit after some time, even without formal review. If it
breaks something it goes out again. Trusted people would basically be
long time committers. I.e. a mix of maintainers and perhaps active
write-after-approvals. The special thing would be that they can write to
the whole tree by default, if nobody cares enough to prevent that.
It's not like the patch authors are a bunch of unresponsible people
randomly hacking crap together ;-) (I know that nobody is saying that) I
would predict that GCC would gain quality by a much more open and
accepting policy.
> I know it's frustrating for people when their hard work doesn't get
> reviewed for long periods of time. But GCC is a mature compiler, it's
> stable, and while it has bugs and could be better, I'm not sure I *want*
> GCC to start changing much more rapidly than it changes today. Bugs
> will be fixed, yes. New features will be introduced, yes. But will the
> quality level be maintained? That's the whole reason we insist on patch
> review, so any process that speeds it up has to guarantee that will
> still get a decent review of all patches (other than the truly obvious
> ones).
All patches still would have to be sent to gcc-patches@. We have version
control systems to back out whole patches at once. For some things
reviewing can also happen after applying the patch (for most
self-contained things I would argue). When the patch author is not sure
about his way of tackling the problem he still is able to not check in
without review or discussion. Trust is the key.
Ciao,
Michael.