Re: Feb's patch resolution rate

David Carlton
2004-03-23T21:15:40Z

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:59:15 -0500, Andrew Cagney <cagney@gnu.org> said:

> To this end, I've attached a breakdown of February's patches that
> required approval (i.e., I excluded self approved patches). Looking
> at the numbers:

> - ~60 patches

> - typical (median) review time is 1 day

> - average review time is ~2.5 days

I assume these only count the resolved patches? Because:

> - pinging helps (80% of pings got resolved)

> - ~12% of patches are unresolved (pinged 25%, unpinged 75%)

If 12% of patches have been unresolved, then those alone should be
contributing about 3 days to the average review time.

Another question to ask is: how would allowing global maintainers
to approve patches have improved the situation? Just looking at
unreviewed patches, we see:

> 2004-02-24 -file-list-exec-source-files, Bob Rossi

I don't know if this would have been approved by now; hard to say.

> 2004-02-24 [patch/rfa] Delete jmisc2.exp, Andrew Cagney
> 2004-02-24 [patch/rfa] Test java's "break main", Andrew Cagney
> 2004-02-09 [rfa/testsuite/lib] get_compiler_info: two improvements, Michael Elizabeth Chastain

These are all in areas of the testsuite without active maintainers,
where we nonetheless allow those inactive maintainers to block
approval. These all would have gotten quickly approved otherwise.

> 2004-02-24 [RFA/testsuite] Add testcase for included files, Joel Brobecker
> 2004-02-24 [RFA/dwarf-2] Add support for included files, Joel Brobecker

I don't know enough about this to know how quickly it would have been
approved.

> 2004-02-16 [rfa] Remove add_psymbol_with_dem_name_to_list and uses, Daniel Jacobowitz

I assume Daniel would have approved it himself by now.

> 2004-02-24 p [rfa] fix for PR c++/1553, David Carlton

An extended version of this patch actually did get approved recently;
Daniel, however, favorably commented on the original patch very soon
after it was submitted, so I'm sure it would have gone in much more
quickly if he had been able to approve it.

Corinna has also been waiting for some time for approval for a patch
to minsysms.c (maybe it was from the beginning of March, instead of
February, though); there, too, Daniel quickly commented on the patch,
but he can't approve it.

So, based on this data, it seems to me that allowing global
maintainers to approve patches in all areas of GDB would have made a
significant impact on patch approval time - at least half of the
patches that have been waiting the longest for approval would have
gotten approved much more quickly. Admittedly, the sample is somewhat
skewed: there aren't normally so many patches to dead areas of the
testsuite.

David Carlton
carlton@kealia.com