Re: Patch committers

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> The patches that get sent in are almost always
> either fallout from a customer/company project, or stuff that one of the
> closed-sourced forks has developed that they don't want to maintain, or
> stuff people do "at night" to make their lives easier in the distant
> future.  All of those things are already special arrangements that
> people need to make with their employers and their lives, but they have
> discernible benefits.  But you can't expect a lot of people or employers
> to reserve time on top of that for handholding other people's patches
> and for other "community" stuff that has no easy to measure benefits.

Well, I'm perfectly willing to handhold other people's patches and do
community stuff that has no easy to measure benefits. I'm willing to
do it precisely because I believe it will make it easier to get my own
patches accepted. AIUI, the whole point of CommitFests is that I
agree to review other people's patches and they in turn agree to
review mine, and we all get to scratch our respective itches. In
fact, because I enjoy community work, I'm even willing to spend MORE
time helping other people get their patches in than I do writing my
own patches - but I'm only willing to spend 2x or 3x the time on other
people's stuff that I spend on my own, not 10x.

In the last two CommitFests it has become evident that we have a
problem with freeloading. During the September CommitFest, the set of
reviewers and the set of patch submitters were almost disjoint. Now,
fortunately, we still had enough reviewers; the real shortage was of
committers. But I think that some of the reviews were not as good as
they could have been had they been reviewed by more experienced
contributors, or even just by multiple people. A fair amount of easy
stuff slipped through the review process. Tom cleaned it up, but he
shouldn't have to be responsible for things that a read-through of the
patch by an experienced C programmer should have caught. I tried to
help, but I was fairly tied up with overall CommitFest management and
did not have time for a full read-through of every patch.

...Robert