[Sugar-devel] Bug tracking Vs Patch review

C. Scott Ananian cscott at laptop.org
Mon Jul 26 11:55:47 EDT 2010


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:27 AM, David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com> wrote:
> patch review process and (b) loosing patches.  If a patch is a
> solution to a problem it is not necessary to discuss the problem and
> if it is the patch submitters responsibility to track the patch the
> need for a maintainer to track the patch goes away.

It's easy to say "it's the patch submitter's responsibility", but that:
 a) alienates new members of the community, who feel like their
patches are being ignored and don't understand why their help is not
appreciated, and
 b) begs the question: now what does the patch submitter use to track
submitted patches?  For major developers, this is still a big problem,
and patches are lost simply because the developer lost track of them
in the process.

Similarly, even though a patch may be the "solution to a problem"
doesn't mean its the best solution, or that the patch doesn't need
work (style fixes, regression tests, fixes for corner cases,
backports, updates to latest git).  Often a developer can push a patch
"so far" and then needs to move on to other things.  Using a patch
process -- ideally one associated with a bug tracker -- lets other
developers pick up the pieces and finish the patch where needed.

It's not hard to see examples in (say) Mozilla's bug tracker where 2
or 3 developers (and several years!) were taken to take a particular
patch all the way through the review process.  All of the patches
attached to the bug were "the solution to a problem", and often
individual users were successful in manually applying those patches to
their local copy of the code for some particular use, even though it
was not ready or able to be committed yet (for instance, it didn't
apply to git head any more!).

So, following Einstein's maxim that a process should be "as simple as
possible but not simpler" -- I think you've made things "too simple".
  --scott

-- 
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