From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24843 invoked by alias); 24 Apr 2002 05:19:05 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 24836 invoked from network); 24 Apr 2002 05:19:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO pizda.ninka.net) (216.101.162.242) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 24 Apr 2002 05:19:04 -0000 Received: from localhost (IDENT:davem@localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by pizda.ninka.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA26038; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 22:09:43 -0700 Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 22:19:00 -0000 Message-Id: <20020423.220943.39181580.davem@redhat.com> To: drow@mvista.com Cc: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: which patches to review From: "David S. Miller" In-Reply-To: <20020423105459.A8292@nevyn.them.org> References: <20020422.224035.88562706.davem@redhat.com> <15557.29643.263642.453067@localhost.redhat.com> <20020423105459.A8292@nevyn.them.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SW-Source: 2002-04/txt/msg00913.txt.bz2 From: Daniel Jacobowitz Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 10:54:59 -0400 On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 10:46:35AM -0400, Elena Zannoni wrote: > This is not true. Look through the archives for this mailing list. Actually, Elena, I have to agree with David on this point. I've been lucky in that no one else is working on the areas I was fixing; that's how I ended up maintainer for both of them. It's not 100% true but it's fairly accurate. Thank you Daniel, I was going crazy thinking I was the only person who could see the problems the current GDB patch review process has. The submitter's time is also limited, and also valuable to the GDB project. I think this is the most important comment made thus far. Much of the commentary has been "the maintainers don't have the time", and my main point is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are never going to be new up and coming GDB contributors, ie. the new manpower needed, if the status quo continues like this. This means, you guys should be excited and jump to it when some new person comes on here and spams 30 patches to the list and is all excited about contributing fixes to GDB. This should especially be the case if this new person is not getting paid to work on GDB and is doing the work for more long lasting reliable reasons. What is this project going to do with someone like me who can hit this list with 30 patches to review a day? How long can that kind of situation continue? And if it will just continue, what does the contributors incentive end up looking like long term? Be honest GDB maintainers, if you didn't have some external compelling reason to contribute to GDB (e.g. it's your job to do it), would you be willing to deal with the current review process as a new contributor for any extended period of time? I really doubt you'd put up with it for long. I'm really unhappy that my commentary has been met with claims that I don't know what I'm talking about and that the patch review process for GDB is "not so bad". I've been working on and contributing to a variety of high profile open source projects for 7+ years, and this is the worst I've seen it for such an important source base like GDB. Working on GCC/Binutils vs. GDB is like night and day, and I do not believe this has %100 to do with manpower issues, it's partly because of the approach taken by the maintainers to some extent. This is a very large barrier to entry to get real work done on GDB, whereas for GCC/Binutils there really isn't.