Re: which patches to review

David S. Miller
2002-04-24T05:19:05Z

From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>
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.