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Date:      Thu, 10 Dec 1998 12:49:03 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Kevin Van Maren <vanmaren@fast.cs.utah.edu>, committers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Swat teams (was: problem reports)
Message-ID:  <19981210124903.N12688@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <28264.913255536@zippy.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Wed, Dec 09, 1998 at 06:05:36PM -0800
References:  <19981210123002.K12688@freebie.lemis.com> <28264.913255536@zippy.cdrom.com>

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On Wednesday,  9 December 1998 at 18:05:36 -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>> This might be a short-sighted viewpoint, especially if you have
>> Godot's phone number.
>
> I tried it - you always get an answering machine with a recorded
> message saying "I'll call you right back!"

Ah, you need to take the time of day into account.

>> Fine, but I haven't seen it happening.  I got a lot of documentation
>> when I got my commit privileges, but nothing said ``now go and close
>> your 1000 PRs''.
>
> Joining committers is already an exercise which carries a great deal
> of anxiety for the new member as it is.  In all seriousness, I think
> this would scare a lot of folks into simply running away again.
> Closing even 10 PRs, much less 1000, can be more work than it appears
> or people would probably close 10 for fun before breakfast every
> morning and we wouldn't have a problem at all.

Well, that's not what you said before, and of course the 1000 PRs
weren't intended seriously.  But it would be a good idea IMO.  What do
you others out there think?  Is anybody interested.  I can abuse
Jordan in private otherwise.

>> You misunderstand.  You (or whoever) don't have to do the work, you
>> just need to keep an eye on it: in other words, ensure that people
>> with too little experience or too extreme views don't mishandle PRs.
>
> Well, many complained that phk was doing exactly that with his
> mass-move of PRs to the suspended state 

Yes, this is the kind of thing I was thinking of.

> so we stopped that, but I haven't exactly seen anything better arise
> in place of that arrangement yet.  I can keep an eye on it until the
> cows come home and die of old age, but what's that supposed to
> accomplish most of the time? :-)

OK, I've been through this stuff dozens of times in a different life.
When I have more time I'll come up with a suggestion for a policy,
*if* at least 5 people reply now and say they think this would be a
good idea.

>> That was an example.  But I haven't been able to get it to work on my
>> net for at least 6 months.  This is the kind of PR that can be
>> mishandled:
>
> Or too vague to handle at all. ;) Thanks for the excellent example of
> why many PRs go unclosed and getting into a dialog with each and every
> such submitter for more information is a scary thing indeed to
> contemplate when you look at the sheer number of PRs and the depths of
> cluelessness represented in some of them...

You're missing the point: this PR was closed although there's probably
a problem.  The reviewer tried it on his machines, was unable to
reproduce it, and jumped to the conclusion that the problem was
related to an unsynchronized source tree.  Yes, it's a pain, but
there's probably an undiscovered bug smirking in there somewhere.  And
one of the problems is that even a clueless PR can point to a real
bug.

Greg
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