Re: which patches to review

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

Please take this as it is meant; observations on the process rather
than criticism.  I think there's nothing we can do about it.  I
certainly have no suggestions.

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 10:46:35AM -0400, Elena Zannoni wrote:
>  > I'm sending in a lot of changes, true.  But what really eats me is
>  > that everyone besides me sticks to one of two things in order to
>  > actually get work done with GDB:
>  > 
>  > 1) Become maintainer, so you can just post patches to the target
>  >    you maintain and you don't need to wait for review before
>  >    installation.
>  > 
>  > 2) Stick to "obvious" fixes and therefore can just check them in.
> 
> 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.

I'm not saying that there is anything to be done about it, or that
anything -must- be done about it, but there is a great gap between the
patch review process for binutils/gcc and the corresponding process for
GDB.  It's purely a manpower problem; we don't have enough dedicated
maintainers.

I greatly prefer not doing sweeping fixes to an area I don't maintain
in GDB; between the insistence on small patches and the long review
time, it's almost impossible to do something highly interdependent when
you can't just approve them yourself.

> In my opinion, people have learned that since there may be only one
> person responsible to review their patches, it make sense to send only
> a few at the time. The reviewer's bandwith is limited.

The submitter's time is also limited, and also valuable to the GDB
project.

>  > I'm spending all of my time in patch mangement, going above and beyond
>  > what I really should have to do to get fixes installed (especially the
>  > easier ones).  That is my main point.
> 
> Everybody goes through that. 

Everybody seems to stay in this stage, actually, except for the global
write maintainers or those who follow David's two bullets above (which
I try to).

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer