Re: Well done, Hackers

> "Well done"? It seems to me that we are right where we hoped not to be,
> ie with a ton of barely-completed (if not self-admitted WIP) patches
> dropped on us immediately before feature freeze. Today the commit fest
> idea is looking like a failure.
>
> If we actually manage to ship 8.4 within six months, *that* will be
> "well done".

It looks to me like there are at least half a dozen patches submitted
in the last week that are pretty half-baked and fall into the category
of "Let's submit something before the deadline for CommitFest, in the
hopes of being allowed to finish it later." This completely shafts
the process in two ways. First, anyone who gets assigned to review
one of those patches might as well not bother, since the author is
probably still working frantically on the patch anyway and will likely
find and fix a lot of the issues that any review might turn up.
Second, since the authors are frantically working on their own
patches, they will have no (or diminished) time to review other
people's patches, which is the whole point of CommitFest. It seems to
me that "Work In Progress" needs to mean "I need some feedback this
CommitFest so I can finish it for the NEXT CommitFest" and not "I'd
like to make an end-run around the submission deadline."

On the other hand, the number of patches that fall into this category
is actually not that large as a percentage of the total. A lot of the
larger features have been under development for months and have been
extensively discussed on -hackers or were submitted for the previous
CommitFest. If you could somehow wave your magic wand and get all of
those committed or rejected, I doubt the remaining list would be
terribly intimidating. I have five patches in for this commitfest but
I bet you (tgl) could deal with all of them in an afternoon without
breaking a sweat.

...Robert