Re: Patch pinging

[Andrew Pinski <pinskia at gmail dot com>]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Paolo Carlini <paolo.carlini@oracle.com> wrote:
> On 06/07/2010 11:16 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>> Can you expand? What kinds of process changes would be reasonable to
>> make?
>>
> Following the terminology "irregular contributor", per Jeff message, I
> would not consider unreasonable for irregular contributions to use more
> extensively and consistently the patch-queue, which we have been using
> for some time. In that way all the patches would be perfectly tracked,
> as far as I can see. The last days I have been traveling, thus sorry if
> I missed parts of the discussion, but I don't understand why the
> patch-queue mechanism is not being seriously considered...

Here are my two cents on this issue.
I think we have several issues we are trying to solve.
1) Some patches which have been approved are not applied.
As far as I can see this issue is what is trying to solve with the
"committed at revision XYZ" emails

2) Some patches are not been reviewed and being skipped/dropped on the floor.


Both of these issues are big issues with encouraging people to stay in
the community.

Now I don't have the numbers to submit my next statement but I think
the second issue is a bigger issue than the first issue.

Solving the first issue is up to the reviewer side rather than doing
any technical.  We should encourage the reviewers when they don't
recognize the developer who submitted the patch ask when reviewing the
patch if they have write after approval.

Now the second issue is a much bigger issue and I don't know how to
solve it because even if we have some semi automatic way of getting a
patch in a queue; some patches can still be dropped on the floor.
Having a queue of emails threads that need to be looked through is a
good start but then again we will have the same issue as we have with
bug reports of getting reviewers to review the "unconfirmed" email
threads.  I think we can improve on having a queue but this does not
solve the non technical issue of getting reviewers to review patches.

I think a big way of solving this is through a non technical solution
of having a person who just go through patches and mentors the "non
regular" developers.  Maybe reviewers will do the same later on.  I
know that Ian has done this before so have many other folks and the
ones who had been mentored are still coming back and have become
regular developers and in other cases reviewers.  Though there are
some which thought that the mentoring was an attack against them
rather than trying to help them.

Also change just for the name of change is a bad thing and will just
confuse people even more as evidence of this thread now.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski